Antarctic sea ice edge prediction.

Snake deformation in progress over Antarctica sea ice edge for prediction, iter = 230.

Antarctic sea ice cover plays an important role in shaping the earth's climate, primarily by insulating the ocean from the atmosphere and increasing the surface albedo. The convective processes accompanied with the sea ice formation result bottom water formation. The cold and dense bottom water moves towards the equator along the ocean basins and takes part in the global thermohaline circulation. Sea ice edge is a potential indicator of climate change. Additionally, fishing and commercial shipping activities as well as military submarine operations in the polar seas need reliable ice edge information. However, as the sea ice edge is unstable in time, the temporal validity of the estimated ice edge is often shorter than the time required to transfer the information to the operational user. Hence, an accurate sea ice edge prediction as well as determination is crucial for fine-scale geophysical modeling and for near-real-time operations. In this study, active contour modelling (known as Snake model) and non-rigid motion estimation techniques have been used for predicting the sea ice edge in the Antarctic. For this purpose the SIE has been detected from sea ice concentration derived using special sensor microwave imager (SSMI) observations. The 15% sea ice concentration pixels are being taken as the edge pixel between ice and water. The external force, gradient vector flow, of the sea ice edge for total the Antarctic region is parameterised for daily as well as weekly data set. The sea ice edge is predicted at certain points using a statistical technique. These predicted points have been used to constitute sea ice edge using artificial intelligence technique, the gradient vector flow. The predicted edge has been validated with that of SSMI. It is found that all the major curvatures have been captured by the predicated edge and it is in good agreement with that of the SSMI observations.

Publications

• Pravin Kumar Rana, Mihir Kumar Dash, Aurobinda Routray, and Prem Chand Pandey:
  Prediction of Sea Ice Edge in the Antarctic using GVF Snake Model,
  In Journal of the Geological Society of India, Volume 78, Number 2, August 2011.
• Pravin Kumar Rana, Aurobinda Routray, Mihir Kumar Dash, and Prem Chand Pandey:
  Prediction of Antarctic Sea Ice Edge Using Artificial Intelligence,
  In SCAR/IASC International Polar Year Open Science Conference, Abstract S1.6/O28, St. Petersburg, Russia, July 2008.
• Pravin Kumar Rana:
  Prediction of Sea Ice Edge in the Antarctic Using GVF Snake Model,
  Master of Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, May 2008.