Dynamic, In Situ Measurement of Sea-Ice

• Main Authors: Characteristic Length Colin, Colin Fox, Tim Haskell, Hyuck Chung
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: McMurdo Sound; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.17.8091; http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/~fox/publications/charlengthpreprint.pdf

We present a method for measuring the characteristic length of sea ice based on fitting to a the recentlyfound solution for the flexural response of a floating ice sheet subject to localized periodic loading. Unlike previous techniques, the method enables localized measurements at single frequencies of geophysical interest and, since the measurements may be synchronously demodulated, gives excellent rejection of unwanted measurement signal, e.g. from ocean swell. The loading mechanism is described and we discuss how the effective characteristic length may be determined using a range of localized measurements. The method is used to detemine the characteristic length of the sea ice in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.