Real-time Forecasts of the MOSAiC Drift

The Sea Ice Drift Forecast Experiment (SIDFEx), which has been coordinating drift forecasts for buoys of the International Arctic Buoy Programme between several forecasting centres already since 2017, has been delivering real-time drift forecasts for Polarstern since the onset of the MOSAiC campaign.

The forecasts are based on mutiple systems from several operational forecast centres as well as research institutes. Every six hours we produce a seemless consensus forecast (including uncertainties) out to 120 days ahead based on the forecasts currently available. The forecasts are made available to Polarstern‘s on-board charting system (MapViewer), and can be accessed publicly as follows:

• Most recent consensus forecast of the new floe as graphical product: LINK (Example see figure)
• All previous consensus forecasts of both floes (new floe with „floe2“ in the data name) as graphical product: LINK
• As 2) but with observed drift added afterwards for comparison: LINK
• 4) All consensus forecasts and individual forecasts, for Polarstern and for all other SIDFEx targets, can be accessed through the SIDFEx Webtool https://sidfex.polarprediction.net/. The most recent forecasts are available under the tab „Most recent forecast“, where a specific target time can be selected. The forecasts from various systems will be summarised in a table; clicking on one of the rows will show additional details for the selected forecast on a map and in time series for latitude and longitude. The new MOSAiC-floe can be found under the TargetID POLARSTERN02.

Example for a most recent consensus forecast as graphical product.

Contact person at the AWI: Dr Helge Goessling