| dc.description.abstract | This thesis regards the making of a program to predict ice conditions in the Arctic Circle. The Program has been made to try to prove the hypothesis below, correct. By finding a trend line based on already existing data from state of the art ice condition databases, and combining this with physical measurements, an Ice condition prediction tool, more accurate than anything of current existence, can be developed. The Program has been written in Matlab, to be able to create a user interface acceptable for several different database sources for input at a later stage. In this thesis a satellite image database from The U.S National Ice Center, NATICE has been used as a main source, and physical measurements from Romanov Ice Atlas has been added in addition. Information from three different points representing a route has been stored in Matlab, to be able to find a trend at a specific point. The data from NATICE has been downloaded from their web page weekly, every other week from July 2013- December 1997. With the intention of downloading information back to 1993 as a starting point, and potentially back to 1972 if the time would allow it. Trouble with code language change in the database did however not make it possible to go further back than 1997. The program has been made in three steps: 1. Plot information from 1 week. 2. Choose a random point, and find the ice condition closest to this point. 3. Run the script for more than one week and store the information, being able to make a trend of the conditions, and potentially predict ice conditions at a given point, and in the end a 3-point route. Point 1 60 -170 Point 2 75 160 Point 3 80 130 To find the information closest to a chosen point a script called dist.m was made. This script ended up not working entirely as planned, as some issues were encountered with the database. The gathered information for the point did therefor not always become correct and a clear trend was difficult to see. The overall result from the trend predictions was that there has been no change in ice conditions the last 15 years. The results from this trend prediction made it difficult to compare to a climate model available today. The Romanov Ice Atlas data has been combined with the predictions from the three different points, and have been represented as R1-7 in a table, where CT = total ice concentration, CCT = a conservative measurement of the ice concentration, SA= the ice thickness of the thickest layer of ice. Where: R1: Max sail height of prevailing ice ridges,cm R2: Absolute maximum sail height of any ridges,m R3: Maximum width of ice ridge sails,m R4: Maximum number of ridges pr km R5: Maximum concentration of ridges,% R6: Maximum area occupied by multi-year ice ridges,% R7: Estimated maximum addition to ice thickness due to ridging,cm For the predictions to become more accurate and easier to find, a larger database should be implemented, and the search function dist.m would have to be improved. The results from the trend line were not good enough to be able to prove the hypothesis, but with the changes mentioned above, it is my belief that the results would most likely lead towards proving the hypothesis correct. | nb_NO |
