Empowering our communities to map rough ice and slush for safer sea-ice travel in Inuit Nunangat

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Sea-ice roughness, thickness and slush are key characteristics that determine safe and efficient travel for Inuit. The changing climate is negatively affecting these sea-ice characteristics causing increasedtravel accidents and search-and-rescue incidents. Sea ice is not only a hunting platform and travel highway, it is part of our culture and identity and changing sea-ice conditions are also negativelyaffecting our mental health, food security and cultural practices. By combining our Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ), satellite data and state-of-the-art uncrewed airborne vehicles (UAVs, ordrones), we will co-produce new information on sea ice and snow roughness and slush for the operational SmartICE Ice Travel Safety Maps. The production of these maps will be piloted in ourpartner communities of Arctic Bay, Gjoa Haven, Nain, Pond Inlet, Qikiqtarjuaq, and Salluit, and eventually be expanded to all SmartICE communities (>24) in Inuit Nunangat. Our approach will begrounded in IQ, and include a co-designed Inuit training program for UAV-based sea ice monitoring to augment the mature environmental data collection developed by SmartICE. We will adapt UAVs andsensors to collect high-resolution topographic and electromagnetic data for local travel safety maps, as well as ground-truth a series of novel satellite products of sea-ice thickness and roughness, based onoptical and micro-wave frequencies. With our Arctic Eider Society partner, a growing network of Inuit Nunangat communities will be able to access in near real-time these new satellite and in-situ dataproducts and SmartICE Ice Travel Safety Maps through the Indigenous Knowledge Social Network platform (SIKU). At the request f our Community Management Committees, the local travel safety mapswill also be distributed in paper format within communities.