Arctic Spatial Data Infrastructure – a Base for Arctic Applications

The development of an Arctic Spatial Data Infrastructure was proposed and adopted as a formal activity by the Arctic Council countries to create a mapping environment for use in the polar region. The Council is a forum for the eight circumpolar nations and sovereign indigenous populations to collaborate on social and scientific research of concern to the region. Topics addressed by the Council include biodiversity, environmental protection, effects of climate change, search and rescue, and the marine environment – all of which use and produce geospatial information for monitoring and decision-making and need a geospatial framework to co-ordinate their work.

A consistent public map has never been produced for use in the Arctic at a local to regional scale, nor have existing map service environments supported native equal area polar projections critical for visualisation and analysis in the Arctic. The Arctic SDI is developed to fill these gaps. It provides a freely available online base map and data for use at scales between 1:250,000 and 1:1million through adaptation of existing national map services from the Council nations. Higher-resolution data and maps are provided by some nations, as their national SDI policies allow. The Arctic SDI is ‘virtual’ in the sense that it is not an SDI built from scratch but re-purposes existing national maps and interoperability standards to enable a seamless circumpolar view.

The eight Council member countries – Canada, United States, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and Denmark/Greenland – have adapted their national map services to serve a compatible base map. A single 1:1million scale map service is hosted in the Amazon EC2 environment based on the most recent Digital Chart of the World (VMAP 0) data. The General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) dataset is also served – developed by the British Oceanographic Data Centre to provide a bathymetric base map for the oceans at a resolution of 90m or better.

In each country, OGC Web Map Services (WMS) have been developed from data at 1:250,000 scale. The eight national WMS support a common symbology based on the EuroRegionalMap specification to provide consistent cartography. All layers are served using several Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area coordinate reference systems to provide regional views centred on the North Pole. National map data includes the territorial sea, a 12 nautical mile buffer into the sea or ocean. An OGC Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) is being created to provide a rapid-access cached tile view of the Arctic. OGC Web Feature Services are also being investigated as companions to the WMS to enable download of selected map features and data for further GIS analysis.

The Arctic SDI is a unique virtual data infrastructure supporting unique regional requirements through common standards and providing access to existing national map services and data. As the project goes operational this year, several international applications will evaluate the utility of the Arctic SDI to support polar applications. These projects will be co-ordinated with and through the Council activities to identify additional stakeholder requirements and capabilities to be added.

Learn more about the GSDI Association and how to participate here: http://www.gsdi.org/joinGSDI

Doug Nebert is a member of the Technical Committee of the GSDI Association and the editor of the original ‘SDI Cookbook’. He is senior advisor for Geospatial Technology and system-of-systems architect with the Federal Geographic Data Committee Secretariat with the United States Government.