A New Environment Canada Regional Ice Analysis System

This paper describes a new regional ice analysis system developed at Environment Canada. It is primarily designed to satisfy the requirements for planning of marine transportation and other marine operations in ice-infested waters around North America, including Canada's two Arctic Metareas; regional sea-ice model initialization; and the needs of regional numerical weather prediction models. A three-dimensional variational approach (3D-Var) is used to assimilate various types of observations. In this first version, only analyses of ice concentration are produced at approximately 5 km resolution using a 6 h persistence forecast from the previous analysis as the background state. The assimilated observations are sea-ice concentrations from two sources of passive microwave satellite data, Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth observing system (AMSR-E) and Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I), and manually derived ice charts from the Canadian Ice Service (CIS). Objective verification scores computed...