6th International Workshop on Sea-Ice Modelling and Data Assimilation, 2014 September 15-16, Toulouse, FranceInternational audienceThe key to documenting and understanding change in the Arctic is continuous monitoring. The high cost of Arctic operations thus makes observationsby satellite or with long-endurance, refurbishable, autonomous platforms a cost effective solution to continuously observe on-going changes in nearreal-time. IAOOS (Ice Atmosphere Ocean Observing System, http://www.iaoos-equipex.upmc.fr, http://iaoos.ipev.fr/) is a nine-year France-fundedproject (2011-2019), developed by LOCEAN and LATMOS, which objective is to provide and maintain an integrated observing system over the ArcticOcean that collects synoptic and near real time information related to the state of the atmosphere, the snow, the sea-ice and the ocean