Speaker
Description
Sea-ice plays an essential role in the Earth system and its impact on climate change is large. It cools the entire planet, affects ocean currents and offers a habitat for countless species. Nearly 7% of the ocean is covered by sea ice, but due to climate change, sea-ice is increasingly disappearing. Research into sea-ice is therefore an important scientific endeavor in order to understand the growth and melting of sea-ice and its change and feedbacks under climate warming conditions. Research institutes from around the world are collaborating to get a close view about it and share their research results with each other. With SEA ICE PORTAL we want to make our scientific information available for everyone – promptly, scientifically based, understandable, transparent and in accessible language. Working on the realization of new ways of knowledge transfer is one of our goals.
The SEA ICE PORTAL is an information and data-portal in combination. It started in 2013 and since 2023, the joint project of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), the Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM, and the University of Bremen is available in a completely new format. Within a thorough relaunch process, the sea-ice info-portal got a modern and more accessible interface, which shall address especially users being newcomer to the topic of sea-ice. SEA ICE PORTAL presents daily updated maps of sea-ice for several parameters like sea-ice concentration or extent and additional news updates on latest trends, expeditions and reports of scientists, relined with detailed background information in German as well as in English language. The associated data-portal allows users to access raw data collected from various sources directly and work on it themselves. We also offer a wide range of customized data products, which range from maps and animations of sea-ice related parameters, atmospheric data visualizations and measurement data from deployed buoys. To optimize data flows in an O2A process, we support scientists analyzing their processes in collecting data and bring it from observation to archive in a central framework to secure the data flow for long term. SEA ICE PORTAL is a successful example for sharing a wide range of sea-ice information to the public and offering a lot of different sea-ice depending data for scientific use. The portal is used by interested public, the media, shipping and scientific disciplines that require these customized sea ice data products.
The presentation will outline the challenges especially posed by the heterogeneous user community and the different solutions we have developed to address the target groups.
