IceNet

IceNet is a deep learning sea ice forecasting system developed by an international team and led by the British Antarctic Survey and The Alan Turing Institute. The original IceNet research model, published in Nature Communications was trained on climate simulations and observational data to forecast the next 6 months of monthly-averaged sea ice concentration maps. This version advanced the range of accurate sea ice forecasts, outperforming a state-of-the-art dynamical model (ECMWF SEAS5) in seasonal forecasts of summer sea ice, particularly for extreme sea ice events. Since then, the IceNet team has focussed on building an operational version of the model which forecasts on a daily resolution. The original research code was refactored into icenet: a library for operational forecasting. The icenet library can support further research efforts into AI-based operational sea ice forecasting

In addition, several use cases and an ecosystem of service components are contained within this organisation, supporting execution and downstream analysis.

For further information about the team involved, please look at the project pages at BAS or The Alan Turing Institute.

How do I get started?

Please visit the icenet-notebooks repository and check out the instructions there! :wink:

The repositories listed below are the key ones to pay attention to.

Repositories

icenet-notebooks

Example notebooks showing how to use the library.

icenet

The IceNet library, containing documentation sources. Probably easiest to start with the icenet-notebooks or icenet-pipeline repositories for guidance in the first instance.

icenet-pipeline

A detailed explanation of the machine learning pipeline can be found here. Fundamentally, there is a reusable and continuously executable pipeline from data ingestion through to forecast production and upload. This repository complements the icenet-notebooks repository which explains both CLI and programmatic usage, by actually implementing a load of workflows in bash.

This high level diagram depicts the structuring of the pipeline:

IceNet ML Pipeline

The daily forecasting pipeline centers around a refactored version of the original research model for monthly forecasts, located in this library. An example to using the library can be found here which leverage a BAS developed tool for running model ensembles. on HPCs.

icenet-etl

This project is for the code that provisions the Azure cloud infrastructure. It sets up various Azure resources and is currently under heavy development.

Forecast NetCDFs are deposited into the cloud infrastructure for dissemination and processing.

For further details look at the repository here.

icenet-geoapi

This project has been merged with the icenet-etl project.

icenet-project

This is the public project repository where we manage the collaboration between the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Alan Turing Institute (ATI). We’re always happy to have additional contributors so please feel free to drop by!

Publications

Presentations