Statistics of thickness and strength of first-year ice along the Northern Sea Route

• Published in: Journal of Marine Science and Technology
• Main Authors: Chai, Wei, Leira, Bernt Johan, Høyland, Knut Vilhelm, Sinsabvarodom, Chana, Yu, Zhaolong
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Springer Nature 2020
• Subjects: Arctic; Northern Sea Route; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/11250/2729714; https://doi.org/10.1007/s00773-020-00742-5

In this paper, statistics of ice thickness and ice strength of first-year sea ice along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) is studied to provide useful information for the design and operation of Arctic ships. Specifically, ice thickness, ice strength and other physical parameters of the sea ice are estimated. Four representative sites are selected to study the ice environment and ice strength in different sea areas along the NSR during the ice growth season. Besides that, a good knowledge of the co-variation relationships between these ice parameters in a particular region would promote the estimation of ice loads acting on structures located in this region. In this work, a novel probabilistic model is introduced to describe the probability distribution of the ice flexural strength. The co-variation relationships between ice thickness and ice strength are quantified in terms of correlation coefficients. The influence of air temperature on ice properties is also investigated and discussed. publishedVersion Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.