Lagrangian Ice Tracking System: LITS - A Community Tool for Managing Sea Ice

The Lagrangian Ice Tracking System: LITS (http://icemotion.labs.nsidc.org/IceMotion/PlotCSVtest13.html ) is a community tool for researchers, policy and planning professionals, local and indigenous communities, industries, and educators that need information on ice transport pathways to manage the transition towards less ice. Users can access LITS to improve understanding of changing sea ice patterns and support adaptation strategies, including ascertaining risks to and opportunities for habitat resiliency.

LITS tracks sea ice from formation along its pathway to melting, or backwards from a specified time and place to a prior time or the ice parcel's formation. LITS operates over the satellite era (1979 to 2018) with ice-drift fields derived from observations. LITS also has the ability to look up data at each time step, adding, for example, sea-surface temperature, ice concentration or bathymetry at each location along a pathway. It can run quickly with a small computing footprint because all drift vectors and data overlays are calculated, gridded and staged ahead of time for efficient retrieval. Simulations can be generated in minutes on a desktop machine or internet server, making it extremely efficient to downscale outputs and run many experiments to "workshop" adaptive management strategies.

By translating knowledge into practical and actionable information for adaptive management of coastal regions and sensitive habitats, this tool supports informed decisions and practices, including the ability to: Identify vulnerabilities and improve coastal management strategies Consider trajectories of oil and other pollutants Anticipate changes in local conditions that may influence uses Anticipate and improve responses to extreme local weather conditions Inform industrial and commercial investments Place local changes in a regional, Arctic-wide context

Publicly accessible, with a renovated user interface, LITS gives researchers, educators, coastal communities, resource managers, and industries the ability to run their own simulations and assess systems within the context of historical patterns of ice movements and characteristics. Its 'lightweight' architecture allows users to answer immediate questions quickly and iteratively evaluate a large number of "what if" scenarios.