NOTE: This webtool is a prototype. Please provide feedback to sidfex@polarprediction.net
About SIDFEx
The Sea Ice Drift Forecast Experiment (
SIDFEx) is a community effort to collect and analyse Arctic sea-ice drift forecasts at lead times from days to a year. The forecasts are made with various methods for drifting sea-ice buoys and, ultimately, the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (
MOSAiC), a year-long trans-Arctic drift campaign commencing in autumn 2019. SIDFEx is part of the World Meteorological Organization’s Year of Polar Prediction (
YOPP) and inspired by increasing research and operational needs to forecast future positions of assets drifting in Arctic sea ice. A systematic assessment of real drift forecasting capabilities is also foreseen to improve our physical understanding of sea ice and to help identifying and resolving model shortcomings.Since the launch of SIDFEx in 2017, eleven groups have started contributing drift forecasts for selected buoys of the International Arctic Buoy Program (
IABP) on a regular basis. Most groups derive their 10-days toseasonal-range forecasts by means of diagnostic Lagrangian tracking based on prediction drift fields of coupled or uncoupled general circulation models. Some groups submit ensembles of drift trajectories instead of single (deterministic) trajectories, and several groups submit their forecasts in (near-)real-time.
To learn more about SIDFEx, please visit our website.
About this site
This site is a webtool that allows you to:
(1) Get an overview on the current set of SIDFEx targets, including their past movements and their status, and also an
overview about recent observations of the MOSAiC drift (tab 'Observations').
(2) Explore the past forecasts and how they performed in comparison with obversations (tab 'Browse forecast archive').
(3) Retrieve (near-)real-time forecasts for the currently active SIDFEx targets, including targets related to the MOSAiC Drift.
This site is based on R-Shiny and the
SIDFEx R-package.