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AN INTEGRATED SPATIAL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR ICE SERVICE 
Ziqiang Ou' 
Canadian Ice Service, Environment Canada, 
373 Sussex Drive, E-3, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Kl A 0H3 
Ziqiang.Ou(dec.gc.ca 
KEY WORDS: GIS, Marine, Navigation, Snow Ice, Integration, Decision Support, Spatial Infrastructures 
ABSTRACT: 
The Canadian Ice Service (CIS) of Environment Canada is responsible for providing sea ice and iceberg information under the 
Canadian Federal Ice Program. The mandate of the Canadian Ice Service is to provide timely information on ice conditions for 
navigational purposes, to warn marine operators of hazardous ice conditions, and to maintain a general historic knowledge of ice 
conditions and ice climatology. This paper presents the mission-critical application of Remote Sensing and GIS technology in the 
Canadian Ice Service for supporting the marine community. 
The products are generated on a daily basis and products turnaround time is 24 hours. A typical day for our operation involves the 
real-time data acquisition, processing, and analysis of remotely sensed geographic data; the integration of vector, raster, and 
alphanumeric information; generation and dissemination of text, chart, image and spatially enabled products to clients and partners; 
clients making their decisions based on the information received from CIS. All products are deposited in a central repository and are 
made available to the public and partners via a geo-spatial web service. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Each year, ships face many challenges traveling through North 
American ice and iceberg covered waters. Production and 
delivery of timely ice hazard warnings to ships, marine and 
Northern Canadian communities becomes very important for 
their safety and security. The ice forecast information is used 
by ships and marine community in their decision making and 
route planning. Transportation, oil exploration, environmental 
protection and research institutions rely on ice information for 
their planning, decision support and research purposes. 
Canadian Ice Service (CIS) works closely with Canadian Coast 
Guard (CCG), US Coast Guard (USCG) and US National Ice 
Centre (NIC) for providing ice and iceberg information to 
national and international clients. 
CIS relies on geo-spatial information technology and 
information management technologies for producing ice 
products and disseminating to its clients. The production, 
mapping and dissemination systems, based on client/server and 
parallel computing architecture, use the latest remote sensing, 
GIS, web mapping and data warehouse technology. The 
servers acquires over 10 GB/ day data in real-time from Radar 
and camera systems on-board the aircraft as well as various 
satellites. The major data sources includes Radarsat-I, Envisat, 
NOAA-AVHRR, OLS, QuickScat, GOES and Airborne Radar 
Images. These servers also receive ice observation charts from 
CCG icebreakers and ice reconnaissance aircraft, 
environmental and weather information from Canadian 
Meteorological Centre, ice and GIS information from. US 
National Ice Centre, and spatial data from other national and 
international partners. The received data is automatically 
processed and stored in a central geospatial data repository. 
The ice forecasters and analysts using highly sophisticated 
graphic workstations analyze and integrate information from 
various data sources to generate products and digital maps. 
  
Corresponding author 
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These products and maps are disseminated to partners and 
clients using satellite and terrestrial telecommunications. The 
clients and partners can also access this geospatial data 
repository using Internet and geospatial data networks. In the 
near future, a user will be able to generate maps interactively 
and on demand through our new CIS Archive. The CIS clients 
and Ice Service Specialists on board the CCG ships will be able 
to browse the data repository using standard browsers or Java 
based spatial browsers, select and download the required 
information or retrieve ordered digital maps. 
The Integrated geo-Spatial Information System (ISIS) is a 
decision support system built on ArcGIS, ArcView, ERDAS 
Imagine, Oracle Relational Database, Blue Angel — Metastar 
and ArcSDE, ArcIMS technologies in Microsoft Windows, 
Linux and HP-UX operating environments. The emphasis of 
this paper will be given to the CIS Archive Subsystem. More 
details about the other subsystems can be found in [Ou Z., etc. 
2002], [Koonar A., Scarlett B. and Ou Z. 2004]. 
2. SYSTEM OVERVIEW 
The Integrated Spatial Information System (ISIS) consists of 
cight subsystems: Data Acquisition, Data Archive, Ice 
Analysis, Berg Analysis and Prediction, Product 
Dissemination, Field Decision Support, Climate Support, and 
Data Ordering. Each subsystem provides the following 
functions: 
2.1 Data Acquisition Subsystem 
The Data acquisition Subsystem receives data from different 
sources and platforms, distributes data to other systems,