Estimating Ship Transit Times in Ice-Covered Waters for Strategic Route Analysis and Search and Rescue Response Planning

Abstract

Maritime traffic in the Arctic region is increasing as northern communities grow, tourism accelerates, and large resource development projects enter operation. Consequently, the number of vessels exposed to the navigational challenges and risks in the polar region will continue to rise. The situation is further complicated by fast-changing sea ice conditions due in part to climate change. This thesis explores the state of the art in sea ice risk assessment and transit time estimation in ice-covered waters, and presents a strategic route planning methodology that integrates several concepts from these two active areas of research. This methodology is used to enable the computation of innovative visual representations of marine-based search and rescue response time throughout the year in the Canadian Arctic. This is achieved by combining statistical methods, advanced geospatial data analysis, and network analysis techniques to overcome several computational challenges specific to route generation and transit time estimation in ice-covered waters. The results indicate that there is a statistical relationship between reported vessel speed from Automatic Information System (AIS) and the operational risk from sea ice determined at the time of reporting using the Polar Operational Limit Assessment Risk Indexing System (POLARIS). This relationship is used to specify the expected ship speed in different sea ice risk categories, which is then used to compute the fastest route and expected transit time between geographically separated locations in ice-covered waters. The model can generate the fastest route at different times of year and for different ship ice classes. This is achieved by exploiting the relationship that exists between vessel speed and the outcome of the POLARIS assessment. The methods and results presented in this thesis are shown to support a variety of strategic route analysis applications and provide the necessary computational toolset to apply advanced area-based management approaches to maritime search and rescue response planning.