Modeling progress on wave-ice interactions

Speaker: 
Timothy Williams
Affiliation: 
NERSC
Seminar Date: 
20. September 2012 - 12:30 - 13:15
Location: 
Lecture room, Ground Floor, NERSC

I will describe modeling progress on wave-ice interactions (the WIFAR project: Waves in Ice For ARctic operators) in the marginal ice zone (MIZ).

Aspects of this include how the wave energy is included and attenuated, criteria for when floes should break, and the resulting floe size distribution (FSD) produced when breaking happens.

There are still many uncertainties in the ice properties such as thickness, elastic properties (eg Young's modulus), and the FSD remains generally unobservable making validation problematic.

Also the definition of the MIZ is still an open question. For example, concentration-based definitions and the model's floe size definition differ by approximately a factor of 2, although it is unclear how much of this difference is due to errors in the model and how much due to the difference in floe size (hard to measure) and concentration.