Challenges in Arctic Navigation and Geospatial Data : User Perspective and Solutions Roadmap

Navigation and location-based applications, including business such as transport, tourism, and mining, in Arctic areas face a variety of specific challenges. In fact, these challenges concern not only the Arctic Circle but certain other areas as well, such as the Gulf of Bothnia. This report provides a review on these challengs which concern a variety of technologies ranging from satellite navigation to telecommunications and mapping. In order to find out end-users' views on the significance of Arctic challenges, an online survey was conducted. The 77 respondents representing all Arctic countries, the majority being from Finland, highlighted the challenges in telecommunications as well as accuracy concerns for emerging applications dealing with precise navigation. This report provides a review of possible technologies for addressing the Arctic challenges, based on which a road map for solving them is developed. The road map also uses the results of expert working groups from the Challenges in Arctic Navigation workshop arranged in April 2018 in Olos, Muonio, Finland. This report was produced within the ARKKI project. It was funded by the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the Baltic Sea, Barents and Arctic cooperation programme, and implemented by the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute in collaboration with the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications

Challenges in Arctic Navigation: the User Perspective

This paper underlines the challenges of navigation in the Arctic from the user perspective by means of an online survey. The main target of the survey was to find out the users' views and real-life experiences on the challenges in navigation and geospatial information-based services in the Arctic region. The paper studies relations between the represented industry, encountered challenges and areas of operation. Navigation in the Arctic area and similar circumstances in high latitudes is known to be challenging in terms of weather conditions, lack of services and infrastructure. As the novel technologies, e.g., intelligent transport systems mature, the need for exact and timely geospatial information will increase. According to the results, the most significant challenges are uneven coverage of positioning, untimely weather information, and telecommunication issues. Although the number of respondents was lower than expected (83 complete responses), the results indicate the differences in navigation and location-based services between countries and public versus commercial actors. We found two major dependent variables (nationality and market segment), which are analyzed further. The results suggest guidelines for the future developments of the navigation and positioning services in the high latitudes