Experimental evidence for a universal threshold characterizingwave-induced sea ice break-up

• Published in: The Cryosphere
• Main Authors: Voermans, Joey, Rabault, Jean, Filchuk, Kirill V., Ryzhov, Ivan, Heil, Petra, Marchenko, Aleksey, Collins, Clarence O., dabboor, mohammed, Sutherland, Graig J., Babanin, Alexander V.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications under license by EGU – European Geosciences Union GmbH 2020
• Subjects: Sea ice; The Cryosphere
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10852/81440; http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-84522; https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-4265-2020

Waves can drastically transform a sea ice cover by inducing break-up over vast distances in the course of a few hours. However, relatively few detailed studies have described this phenomenon in a quantitative manner, and the process of sea ice break-up by waves needs to be further parameterized and verified before it can be reliably included in forecasting models. In the present work, we discuss sea ice break-up parameterization and demonstrate the existence of an observational threshold separating breaking and non-breaking cases. This threshold is based on information from two recent field campaigns, supplemented with existing observations of sea ice break-up. The data used cover a wide range of scales, from laboratory-grown sea ice to polar field observations. Remarkably, we show that both field and laboratory observations tend to converge to a single quantitative threshold at which the wave-induced sea ice break-up takes place, which opens a promising avenue for robust parametrization in operational forecasting models.