Spatiotemporal Data Model of Sea-Ice Data

Ice charts have been widely used as a dominated approach or de facto data standard for organizing sea-ice data. These charts are sufficient for safer navigation, oil drilling and so on, but may not be suitable for advanced spatiotemporal analysis in climate studies such as change tracking, factor analysis and data simulation. In addition, sea-ice data presented in ice charts is difficult to integrate with other marine related data, partially due to its different data formats when derived from different sources. In this paper, a spatiotemporal data modeling approach is proposed, based on MADS (Modeling of Application Data with Spatiotemporal features) and CMDTs (Common Marine Data Types) approaches. The approach allows sea ice data modeling at both conceptual and logical levels. This extended model can provide more accurate representation of sea-ice data with spatial and temporal information, and improve sea ice data storage, management and analysis because of its ability of integrating other data that are related to sea ice and representing sea ice dynamic processes.