Iceagle

Ice Lead Analysis with GNNs

Ice lead analysis is an essential task for evaluating climate change processes in the Arctic. Ice leads are narrow cracks in the sea-ice, which build a complex network. Dynamics of ice leads over time remain largely hidden and unexplored until today. We propose to to interpret ice leads as more than just airborne images, but as dynamic networks. This new network perspective on ice leads could be of great interest for the cryospheric science community since it opens the door to new methods for ice lead forecasting and tracking. We found out that current network analysis methods cannot be easily used for ice lead networks, since they are fundamentally different from common networks. Hence, our work is also a call for extending existing network analysis toolkits to include a new class of real-world dynamic networks.

Image: Icelead Photograph by Joe MacGregor, stored at NASA’s Airborne Science Program.