Projects Join to Assess Arctic Environment, Safeguard Scientific Expedition and Shipping

A joint inter-project meeting on the Arctic Shipping and its assessment was held at Harbin Engineering University (HEU) on January17, 2020, attended by nearly 20 backbone scientists from two national key R&D projects to report, exchange and discuss their researches and progresses about this topic in the year of 2019.

The two projects are the “Analysis and Evaluation of Structural Safety in Extreme Environments for Arctic Shipping (SAMPS), led by the School of Ship Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, together with the “Multi-Parameters Arctic Environmental Observations and Information Services’ (MARIS)”, led by the CAS Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Sciences under the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR). 

Both projects are supported by China-EU International Cooperation under the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST)'s Key R&D Programs for Intergovernmental International Cooperation on Scientific and Technological Innovation.

The projects are oriented towards Arctic environmental monitoring, shipping safety and services for Arctic, including technologies innovation, remoted Arctic environmental monitoring, short-term sea ice forecast, shipping safety and information services. 

Thanks to domestic research consortium and international collaboration efforts, MARIS project has been going on smoothly. The Joint Center for Arctic Observations has been established jointly, research on the related data exchange and processing has been conducted, space-borne observation products for the Arctic environment have been developed, and short term Arctic sea ice forecasting and multisource information services for Arctic shipping activities has been experimented in the year past.

As reported in the meeting, in the summer of 2019, the project has provided comprehensive remote sensing information services for China's 10th Arctic Scientific Expedition and Arctic Shipping with multiple voyages of COSCO. New attempts have been made in fast monitoring in key area of thin and margin ice regions, and short-term sea ice forecast were combined into this digital services by the MARIS group.

The joint project meeting evidenced that, in the field of Arctic shipping and safety, it is urgent to strengthen cooperation between projects and multi-disciplinary experience to provide feasible high-precision information for safety assessment of shipping operations, and even with the data from the ship engineering knowledge in the Arctic region.

Arctic sea ice monitoring safeguard Arctic shipping activities.