MEASUREMENTS OF PERMEABILITY OF SEA ICE

• Main Authors: Toshiyuki Kawamura, Masao Ishikawa, Toru Takatsuka, Shinsuke Kojima, Kunio Shirasawa
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: KEY WORDS; Sea ice; Permeability; Ice Types; Ice properties
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.539.4338; http://web2.clarkson.edu/projects/iahrice/IAHR 2006/contents/54_s70.pdf

Recently contribution of snow cover to sea ice growth has become of major interest. The contribution is partly due to snow-ice formation, which needs to infiltrate seawater through sea ice. Measurements on such an index, i.e. permeability, have scarcely been done in spite of a quite important factor. We measured the permeability of sea ice in both field and laboratory experiments. In the field studies, we obtained the values of the orders of-11 to-10. Definite relations between the permeability and the ice properties, e.g. temperature, salinity and structure, were not found. In the laboratory experiments, especially, we aimed to clarify difference of the permeability between ice types, i.e. granular and columnar ice. We obtained the values of the permeability of the same order of the magnitude as those in the field studies. The values were compared with those of the previous studies.