Community Challenge for Image-Derived Observation of Sea Ice Drift and Deformation

Abstract. Ongoing and unprecedented Arctic sea ice changes impact Arctic life, industry, and the environment. The sea ice cover is becoming younger, thinner, less expansive, and more dynamic; important changes we do not fully understand. Measuring sea ice motion with high fidelity, over large areas and long timescales, is needed to assess how ice dynamics are evolving. Addressing key hypotheses about ice dynamics will improve predictions of Arctic sea ice and climate change and enable developing strategies to adapt to and mitigate adverse effects of sea ice loss. Therefore, we seek to accelerate the development of tools that measure sea ice motion and deformation.

Current tools for extracting sea ice motion from remote sensing imagery produce motion fields too coarse in resolution to resolve individual floes and fractures and have a limited ability to resolve certain types of motion such as floe rotation. Addressing these shortcomings by deploying higher fidelity motion analysis over large areas and at high cadence, is needed to test hypotheses about the effect of small scale fracture mechanics on larger scale motion. We aim to focus such efforts by creating a “community challenge problem” against which methods can be tested. We release a dataset that includes all necessary input imagery and a standardized validation process using ground truth motion derived from extensive drifting buoy networks. The problem is documented in a manner designed to enable contributions to the challenge from outside the core sea ice community.