The purpose of this paper is to present an outline of the collection, analysis, and presentation for engineering purposes of environmental data necessary to marine activities in the Canadian Arctic sector and contiguous waters.
Arctic North America is perhaps man's last land frontier in terms of knowledge of geography, environment, resources, human and material, and all other considerations.
Attempts have been made for years to transit the area almost entirely for the purpose of finding a short commercial route to China from Europe. Such efforts have produced side benefits in that large fleets of whaling vessels operated in the area for many years and, of course, naval expeditions, mostly connected with scientific endeavours, have also been involved. As people returned from the area, so they noted the weather and environmental conditions in their diaries or reports; but, without exception, the recording of all such data was on a disorganised, highly individualistic basis, and no attempts were made, subsequently, to collect the data, analyse it and produce useful information, with the possible exception of Swithinbank and the U.S. Navy. Some useful research has been done over the last thirty years, the most notable of which is by Brewer at Barrow, and, of course, a good deal of pragmatic input from the M.S.T.S. activities in the Arctic in connection with the construction of the Dew Line sites. The Canadian Government has, since1959, been keeping a formal, properly organized record of the ice regime in some Canadian waters, and it is this data that forms a solid basis for reference and ongoingresearch.
The first real impetus was occasioned by the so-called Prudhoe Bay discoveries.
The difficulties in producing acceptable environmental data for the area are threefold. The first and most obvious is the collection of all known data. A wide search, spanning a substantial period of years, is fundamental to the validity of such data, since the longer the period under observation (with a consequential increase in precision averaging), the more accurate will be the data.
The second problem is the selection of the method of presentation. Conventional means used in scientific or highly professional circles is suitable for the person particularly trained in that discipline but recognising that the majority of users of this data would be naval architects, engineers in ocean engineering, navigators and superintendents of exploration, it will be obvious that a simpler and more readily understood method had to be developed.
