As presented in several posts already, the team in Hamburg has developed a method to estimate thin sea ice with SMOS data. This method complement very nicely the Cryosat retrievals. The team has been a step further and is now investigating, within an ESA project, how such daily information could be used operationally to help routing boats. The idea is to select the shortest path from one point to the other as a function of ice thickness and distance , both impacting fuel consumption.
A field experiment is currently starting as depicted here to validate the approach.So SMOS might also help save energy?!