Sea ice floes dissipate the energy of steep ocean waves
A laboratory experimental model of an incident ocean wave interacting with an ice floe is used to validate the canonical, solitary floe version of contemporary theoretical models of wave attenuation in the ice-covered ocean. Amplitudes of waves transmitted by the floe are presented as functions of i...
Published in: | Geophysical Research Letters |
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Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
Other Authors: | |
Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | unknown |
Published: |
Wiley
2015
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/409291 https://doi.org/10.1002/2015GL065937 |
Summary: | A laboratory experimental model of an incident ocean wave interacting with an ice floe is used to validate the canonical, solitary floe version of contemporary theoretical models of wave attenuation in the ice-covered ocean. Amplitudes of waves transmitted by the floe are presented as functions of incident wave steepness for different incident wavelengths. The model is shown to predict the transmitted amplitudes accurately for low incident steepness but to overpredict the amplitudes by an increasing amount, as the incident wave becomes steeper. The proportion of incident wave energy dissipated by the floe in the experiments is shown to correlate with the agreement between the theoretical model and the experimental data, thus implying that wave-floe interactions increasingly dissipate wave energy as the incident wave becomes steeper. |
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