Developing Strategies to Facilitate Long Term Seabed Monitoring in the Canadian Arctic using Post Processed GPS and Tidal Models

• Main Authors: Ian Church, Steven Brucker, Dr. John, Hughes Clarke, Susan Haigh, Jason Bartlett
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Arctic; Baffin Island; Oliver Sound; Baffin
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.533.1762; http://www.omg.unb.ca/omg/papers/Church_UShydro09.pdf

As international shipping, interests in commercial activities and resource development increase in the Canadian Arctic, the impact of these stresses on the local environment must be monitored. The capability exists to repeatedly survey areas of interest using multibeam sonar, in an effort to detect changes over time and identify potential geohazards. The difficulty is that temporal changes in the seabed morphology are often hard to detect and measure due to complexities in the local tidal regime and inherent errors in high latitude GPS observations. The head of the Oliver Sound fjord, on northern Baffin Island, was surveyed in September of 2006 using the Ocean Mapping Group’s survey launch, the Heron, with an EM3002 and CNav Globally Corrected GPS. The head of the fjord was then resurveyed in September of 2008, again with the Heron. Changes in the seabed morphology are evident, but quantifying these changes requires improvement of the horizontal and vertical GPS positioning solutions. Steep fjord walls and the latitude of the site, at 72 degrees north, present conditions which obstruct the view of geosynchronous CNav correction satellites and the majority of the GPS constellation. Lack of tidal information at the head of the sound also results in a source of sounding error and prevents