Canadian Ice Service archive: overview
The Canadian Ice Service Archive manages a vast collection of historical ice data that is updated daily.
Why does the Canadian Ice Service maintain an ice archive?
It is done for many different reasons, namely:
- Climate studies: historical ice data can serve a wide variety of scientific and commercial purposes, such as general research efforts, planning activities, ship design, and more
- Legal purposes: our ice information can be useful, for example, in the case of investigations following shipping accidents, insurance purposes, etc.
- Other uses: tourism, fishing, environmental impact studies, stock replenishing, as well as engineering studies for the construction of facilities (bridges, harbours, drilling platforms) in ice-covered waters.
What Kind of Information does the Canadian Ice Service keep?
The Canadian Ice Service Archive includes data in various forms:
- Ice and iceberg charts in several types of media (paper, microfilm, and digital formats);
- A large collection of aircraft and satellite imagery; and
- Bulletins and other text documents.
Online access to the archive
Currently, only the collections listed below are accessible online.
- Ice Charts [Details on charts and formats]
- Daily Ice Charts (available in Graphics Interchange Format)
- Black and White
- World Meteorological Organization - Colour
- Weekly Regional Ice Charts (available in Graphics Interchange Format, Shapefile and E00)
- Black and White
- World Meteorological Organization - Colour
- Daily Iceberg Charts (available in Graphics Interchange Format)
- Daily Ice Charts (available in Graphics Interchange Format)
- Ice thickness Data