The Arctic Portal – A Comprehensive Geo-Informational System to Study the Arctic with Satellite Data

This work describes the Arctic Portal - a geographic information system (GIS), allowing monitoring and forecasting the state and dynamics of the ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere system in the Arctic region, based on the integrated use of satellite and model data. The paper summarizes the general features of the Arctic Portal and clarifies its main structural peculiarities. The Arctic Portal is a freely available web application, which uses a set of programming technologies and open source libraries, providing reliable and fast satellite data processing, the final goal of which is to visualize data on the Arctic map. In addition to data representation, it has several capabilities, which makes usage of the Portal the "first step" for educational or scientific research.