| Summary: | The motivation of this study is to examine changes in the ice conditions and in sea state in the Arctic seas. The last decades witnessed increase in the Arctic offshore operations, partly driven by raising energy needs and partly due to easing of sea ice conditions and improving accessibility of the shipping routes through all the seasons [1]. We present an overview of the two projects: the EU FP7 Project ‘Ships and waves reaching Polar Regions (SWARP)’ and the NERC UK Innovation Grant 'Safer Operations at Sea - Supported by Operational Simulations (SOS-SOS)'. The study is carried by an international team of researchers with the focus on the offshore and navigational safety in the high-latitude oceans. The objectives of the research are to develop forecasting technologies and to provide key information for the maritime operations and marine information services. The projects make assessments of the likelihood of extreme loads on a selection of structures and ships, in open ocean, pack ice and Marginal Ice Zone (MIZ) via accounting for combined loads form tides, waves and ocean currents [2,3]. The study proposes detailed data requirements for safety limits using sea ice dynamical variables, ice concentration, floes sizes and thickness fields, significant wave heights and speed of the total ocean currents. The research makes assessment of the current and future states of the Arctic shipping based on high-resolution model future projections of the sea ice, waves and ocean following the IPCC climate scenarios.
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