An Integrated Marine Arctic Prediction System for METAREAs

In December 2007 Canada accepted official designation as the Issuing Service for meteorological Marine Safety Information (MSI) in the form of forecasts / warnings and ice bulletins for METAREAs XVII and XVIII as part of the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS). These areas are in the Arctic bordering on Canada. An important part of Environment Canada's involvement is the development of an integrated marine Arctic prediction system and satellite products in support of monitoring and warnings. The integrated marine Arctic prediction system will feed into a highly automated information dissemination system. In particular, our group is working on the development, validation and implementation of marine forecasts with lead times of 1 to 3 days using a regional high resolution coupled multi-component (atmosphere, land, snow, ice, ocean and wave) modelling and data assimilation system to predict near surface atmospheric conditions, sea ice (concentration, thickness, pressure, drift, ice edge), freezing spray, waves and ocean conditions (temperature and currents). The core of the system is an Arctic extension of the highly successful Gulf of St. Lawrence coupled modelling system, with the GEM (Global Environmental Multi-scale) model as the atmospheric component coupled to the NEMO (Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean) ocean model and the CICE ice model. An ice-ocean data assimilation system is being developed in collaboration with Mercator-Océan using their SAM2 system for ocean data assimilation together with the 3DVAR ice analysis system developed at EC. The METAREAs research and development is a cornerstone activity within the Canadian Operational Network of Coupled Environmental PredicTion Systems (CONCEPTS). This talk will provide an overview of these activities, illustrate some results to date, and discuss plans for future operational systems.