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)
• Ice thickness Data