Floe-size distributions in laboratory ice broken by waves

Herman, Agnieszka; Evers, Karl‐Ulrich; Reimer, Nils

doi:10.5194/tc-12-685-2018

Cited by 49 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…In Bennetts et al (), floes fracture according to a strain criterion similar to ours, but the change in the FSD is calculated assuming a “split power law” distribution of floes sizes based on observations from Toyota et al (). Zhang et al () and Bennetts et al () impose behavior on fractured floe sizes that is inconsistent with results from a small‐scale model (Montiel & Squire, ) and laboratory observations (Herman et al, ), which indicate preferred sizes in the FSD resulting from wave fracture. Developing or tuning models to explicitly match “split power law” shapes may be misleading, as many observations do not show this distribution (e.g., Inoue et al, ; Paget et al, ; Wang et al, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Recently, pan‐Arctic (Zhang et al, ) and stand‐alone (Bennetts et al, ) models which include floe size information have been demonstrated, but these impose the FSD shape or behavior rather than allowing it to emerge from physical processes acting on individual floes. Further, the power law FSD profiles used to develop these empirical parametrizations may be inconsistent with observations (Herman, ) and the physics of sea ice floes (Herman et al, ; Horvat & Tziperman, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Emergent Sea Ice Floe Size Distribution in a Global Coupled Ocean‐Sea Ice Model

et al. 2018

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Sea ice is composed of discrete floes, which range in size across orders of magnitude. Here we present a model that represents the joint distribution of sea ice thickness and floe size. Unlike previous studies, we do not impose a particular form on the subgrid‐scale floe size distribution. Floe sizes are determined prognostically by the interaction of five key physical processes: new ice formation, welding of floes in freezing conditions, lateral growth and melt, and fracture of floes by ocean surface waves. Coupled model results suggest that these processes capture first‐order characteristics of the floe size distribution, including decay in the distribution with increasing floe size and basin‐wide spatial variability in representative radius. Lateral melt and floe welding are particularly important, with wave fracture creating floes at preferred sizes. The addition of floe size dependence to the existing model physics results in significant reductions in sea ice concentration, particularly in summer and principally due to floe size‐dependent lateral melt. The increased lateral melt alters partitioning of the melting potential, which reduces basal melt and increases sea ice thickness in some locations. These results suggest that including a floe size distribution may be important for accurate simulation of the polar climate system.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Emergent Sea Ice Floe Size Distribution in a Global Coupled Ocean‐Sea Ice Model

et al. 2018

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“…The model includes a standard elasto-visco-plastic rheology (Hunke and Dukowicz, 1997), using the stress tensor formulation of Bouillon et al (2013) adapted for the C-grid used in the model. The ice strength is determined following Hibler III (1979), with the ice strength P following P = P * h e C(1−c) , where P * = 20 000 N m −2 and C = 20 are empirical positive parameters, and h is the cell-average sea ice thickness. The plastic failure threshold lies on an elliptical yield curve, with the eccentricity set to 2.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a coupled model to investigate wave–sea ice interactions in the Arctic marginal ice zone

et al. 2020

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Abstract. The Arctic marginal ice zone (MIZ), where strong interactions between sea ice, ocean and atmosphere take place, is expanding as the result of ongoing sea ice retreat. Yet, state-of-the-art models exhibit significant biases in their representation of the complex ocean–sea ice interactions taking place in the MIZ. Here, we present the development of a new coupled sea ice–ocean wave model. This setup allows us to investigate some of the key processes at play in the MIZ. In particular, our coupling enables us to account for the wave radiation stress resulting from the wave attenuation by sea ice and the sea ice lateral melt resulting from the wave-induced sea ice fragmentation. We find that, locally in the MIZ, the ocean surface waves can affect the sea ice drift and melt, resulting in significant changes in sea ice concentration and thickness as well as sea surface temperature and salinity. Our results highlight the need to include wave–sea ice processes in models used to forecast sea ice conditions on short timescales. Our results also suggest that the coupling between waves and sea ice would ultimately need to be investigated in a more complex system, allowing for interactions with the ocean and the atmosphere.

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“…Recently, Cheng et al (2018) used the same data in an analysis of the influence of floe size on wave dispersion. Other LS-WICE results were used to study floe-size distributions in sea ice broken by waves (Herman et al, 2017(Herman et al, , 2018 as well as wave-induced collisions and floe kinematics (Li and Lubbad, 2018). A sketch of the experiment set-up is shown in Fig.…”

Section: Experiments Set-upmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wave energy attenuation in fields of colliding ice floes – Part 2: A laboratory case study

Herman¹,

Cheng²,

Shen

2019

The Cryosphere

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Abstract. This work analyses laboratory observations of wave energy attenuation in fragmented sea ice cover composed of interacting, colliding floes. The experiment, performed in a large (72 m long) ice tank, includes several groups of tests in which regular, unidirectional, small-amplitude waves of different periods were run through floating ice with different floe sizes. The vertical deflection of the ice was measured at several locations along the tank, and video recording was used to document the overall ice behaviour, including the presence of collisions and overwash of the ice surface. The observational data are analysed in combination with the results of two types of models: a model of wave scattering by a series of floating elastic plates, based on the matched eigenfunction expansion method (MEEM), and a coupled wave–ice model, based on discrete-element model (DEM) of sea ice and a wave model solving the stationary energy transport equation with two source terms, describing dissipation due to ice–water drag and due to overwash. The observed attenuation rates are significantly larger than those predicted by the MEEM model, indicating substantial contribution from dissipative processes. Moreover, the dissipation is frequency dependent, although, as we demonstrate in the example of two alternative theoretical attenuation curves, the quantitative nature of that dependence is difficult to determine and very sensitive to assumptions underlying the analysis. Similarly, more than one combination of the parameters of the coupled DEM–wave model (restitution coefficient, drag coefficient and overwash criteria) produce spatial attenuation patterns in good agreement with observed ones over a range of wave periods and floe sizes, making selection of “optimal” model settings difficult. The results demonstrate that experiments aimed at identifying dissipative processes accompanying wave propagation in sea ice and quantifying the contribution of those processes to the overall attenuation require simultaneous measurements of many processes over possibly large spatial domains.

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Floe-size distributions in laboratory ice broken by waves

Cited by 49 publications

References 38 publications

An Emergent Sea Ice Floe Size Distribution in a Global Coupled Ocean‐Sea Ice Model

An Emergent Sea Ice Floe Size Distribution in a Global Coupled Ocean‐Sea Ice Model

Towards a coupled model to investigate wave–sea ice interactions in the Arctic marginal ice zone

Wave energy attenuation in fields of colliding ice floes – Part 2: A laboratory case study

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