Ice Forecasting

Ice Forecasting is PolArctic's custom sea ice forecasting service for organisations that operate in Arctic waters, where changing ice makes past conditions an unreliable guide for planning. The service automatically processes satellite imagery and data, combines it with historical ice records and oceanographic science, and runs proprietary AI models that PolArctic codes from scratch; the architectures it lists include convolutional neural networks, U-Net, generative adversarial networks, physics-informed neural networks and transformers.

It produces short-term forecasts out to 10 days and seasonal forecasts for long-term planning, delivered through custom interactive dashboards, reports and high-resolution maps, with ice-navigation risk expressed as POLARIS risk assessment codes. Buyers named by PolArctic are in shipping, fishing, mining, insurance and government.

Published projects include a 13-week seasonal forecast with daily operational ice updates for a shipping company in Alaska transiting the Northwest Passage. Crowley Government Services says using the model thirteen weeks ahead of its operations let it optimise tanker charter time, saving $1.3 million. For Lloyd's Market Association, PolArctic aggregated ice chart data from multiple sources and built a pan-Arctic platform giving underwriters real-time and forecast ice data. For the US Department of Defense's Ted Stevens Center it built a sea ice dashboard using satellite imaging of ice extent, and it provided three years of seasonal forecasts and weekly ice reports to an Arctic shipping company supporting mining operations.

PolArctic, founded in 2018, is an Alaska Native, women and disabled veteran owned small business and was part of Lloyd's Lab Cohort 10.