Abstract
Icebergs have long been a threat to shipping in the NW Atlantic and the iceberg season of February to late summer is monitored closely by the International Ice Patrol. However, reliable predictions of the severity of a season several months in advance would be useful for planning monitoring strategies and also for shipping companies in designing optimal routes across the North Atlantic for specific years. A seasonal forecast model of the build-up of seasonal iceberg numbers has recently become available, beginning to enable this longer-term planning of marine operations. Here we discuss extension of this control systems model to include more recent years within the trial ensemble sample set and also increasing the number of measures of the iceberg season that are considered within the forecast. These new measures include the seasonal iceberg total, the rate of change of the seasonal increase, the number of peaks in iceberg numbers experienced within a given season, and the timing of the peak(s). They are predicted by a range of machine learning tools. The skill levels of the new measures are tested, as is the impact of the extensions to the existing seasonal forecast model. We present a forecast for the 2021 iceberg season, predicting a medium iceberg year.
Highlights
IntroductionAcademic Editor: Paul Tae-Woo Lee. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
This paper presents a new machine learning approach to forecasting iceberg behaviour in the North West Atlantic
The flexibility of the machine learning tools allows for a prediction of practically any quantity, restricted only by the available data
Summary
Academic Editor: Paul Tae-Woo Lee. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Icebergs have been a threat to shipping in the North Atlantic since humans first ventured onto that stretch of ocean. They mostly originate from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has increasingly been losing mass since the 1990s under climate warming [1]. The first recorded iceberg incident with North Atlantic shipping occurred in 1686, with the ‘Happy Return’ sinking in the Hudson Bay while on a trade operation for the North West
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