Abstract Manager

Each winter, in Northern Canada, an estimated 10,000 km of official and unofficial winter roads are built and maintained on frozen water bodies and land features. They are a vital infrastructure that interconnect many of Canada’s remote northern communities. The roads provide an essential service to transport goods and people to, from and between communities, and to support the economic viability of mining operations. Construction and management of winter roads is heavily reliant on climatic parameters (e.g., air and water temperatures, ice thickness and quality, snowfall) for both the overland and over-ice segments. The challenges of managing the winter road infrastructure are further compounded by the warming climate. A need for more sophisticated tools and information products has been identified to better serve the winter road operators, users and decision-makers.

In this paper, a prototype, vehicle-mounted, winter road surveying system is described. It records key parameters pertinent to the management of winter roads and from which data products, for the relevant stakeholders, can be generated. The primary sensors on the system are a global navigation system (yielding position), compass (heading), accelerometers (angles of slope and cross grade), lidar (3D point-clouds for generating digital elevation models), optical cameras, and a voice data logger (for the operator to record observations). These sensors are integrated using an onboard data acquisition system. The collected data can be integrated with data derived from ground penetrating radar – a device frequently used to estimate ice thickness. Data processing will generate customised data-products in near real-time that will be disseminated to stakeholders. The system is designed such that it can be easily fitted to a standard pick-up truck with no modification. The system is small enough to be installed on a snowmobile.  The prototype system was deployed on a section of the Yellowknife to Wekweètì winter road in the Northwest Territories in March 2024. Initial results are presented. The system is being funded and developed as part of research to support climate resilient infrastructure under NRCs Climate Resilient Built Environment Initiative (CRBE).