Frej och Oden. Foto: Hanna Hagelin

For the research cruise bound north of Svalbard, the NTNU science team has instrumented Oden and Frej with technical systems to collect scientific data and aid multi-vessel operations in sea ice. Both ships carry a wide array of cameras, motion sensors, machinery instrumentation, communication systems, and radar systems to collect data from the operation, the ice conditions in the area, and the ship performance.

Our objective is to use the data to develop and verify technical solutions for ship design, operation planning, monitoring, forecasting, and risk assessment. Since good technical systems for remote sensing exist today, but not customized to operations in Arctic sea ice, we work on developing such systems ourselves.

On this cruise we focus on shipboard measurement systems for real-time monitoring of ice drift, ice thickness, abnormal ice features, the amount of ice on the sea surface, ice failure mechanisms, the ice floe sizes and distributions, and the ice forces on the vessel. Besides proof-of-concept related to new technical system, the measured data will be used to verify and validate our numerical tools.