Polarview@FIMR: WWW-based delivery of baltic sea ice products to end-users

Sea ice information for navigational purposes is essential in the Baltic Sea. Winter navigation is made possible by the use of icebreakers, ice-strengthened vessels and by restricting navigation. Thus the icebreakers need detailed ice information for route planning. The smoothness of traffic has been possible due to better ice monitoring, where use of Earth observation data has become more and more important. For this purpose the FIMR PolarView web pages have been set up and they contain information to aid navigation in the area of the Baltic Sea. One such future SAR-based product could be the ice motion estimated from successive SAR images. For this purpose an algorithm for the ice motion detection has been developed at FIMR. Also the presentation of the existing products will be developed, for an example also the animations of the SAR-based ice thickness charts and ice predictions will probably be available in near- real-time next winter.