River Ice Thickness

There are two methods of measuring ice thickness:

• Four Sea Ice Mass Balance Arrays (SIMBA) are installed in the ice throughout the winter sending temperature data via satellite.
• Helicopter mounted Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) measure ice thickness along linear surveys.

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File Provider (EO Team)

Product Description

Information required for product development.

Service Name	Description	Data Owners	File Type
River Ice	Ice thickness is measured continuously at four locations and is used as an input to break up forecasting	Pradeep, Kelley, Mike	.csv (spreadsheet)

Ancilliary Information

• Product set-up prerequisites:
  • AOI
  • Locations/places
  • Segments and Labels
  • SIMBA Stations

Naming Convention

The following naming convention applies to all River Ice Thickness files sent to WRMD:

Ice_Thickness_RRR_YYYY-MM-DD.csv
YYYY - Year
MM - Month
DD - Day
RRR - River 

Example:

Ice_Thickness_Chu_2021-04-12

Data Uploading Instructions

• All River Ice Thickness files should be uploaded to Coresight’s Amazon S3 Bucket:
  • S3 link here.
  • Contact Coresight for account credentials (alias, username and password)
• Fill out the Coresight Product Onboarding Checklist for new products.

Example Input Image

Example CSV file uploaded to Coresight cloud storage.

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Coresight

Developers

• Jeremy Hetzel
• Chris Boyce.

Processing

Description

Data processing takes place using an ingester that imports, converts, creates and stores files.

Ingester Script

The bulk of the ingestion work on each file is done in the cloud and the script can be found in the river-ice-ingester repository.

Ingester Functions

• File reading - data collection from fields in the CSV files
• STAC item creation - Automatic naming based on date, product type and AOI matching.
• STAC catalog:
  • Automatic STAC item sorting based on item name.
  • Automatic storage in a Firestore collection based on product type and AOI matching.
• Notification - emails developers upon product publication.

Real time API Access

The FastAPI OpenAPI endpoint for the river-ice-ingester can be found here.

Service Interface

• The River Ice Web interfaces retrieve product information through the firestore collection.

• Ice Thickness on the Churchill interface (figure below):

  • Beginning with the 2019‐2020 ice season, approximately between mid‐January and the end of April, ice thickness measurements are displayed on the application.
  • These data come from four locations on the ice cover where ice thickness is being measured and are identified by the blue markers.
  • The numbers within each marker represent the ice thickness measured in centimeters at the time of the ice classification or change.
  • Use the left mouse button to display all of the ice thickness data available for a particular ice season.
  • Use the mouse to hover over a point on the line and the ice thickness for that time will be displayed.
  • These measurements are only available during the season when there is a solid ice cover.
  • This information is not available during freeze‐up or break‐up.
  • The measurements come from equipment installed on the ice, which measures, records, and transmits temperature data autonomously.

• Ice thickness chart