New Tools to Generate Realistic Ice Floe Fields for Computational Models

Global warming has extensively transformed Arctic sea ice from continuous level-ice coverage to unconsolidated ice floe fields. Whilst the ice floes have a mixture of different sizes and their locations are randomly distributed, contemporary computational models lack effective methods to generate fl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Huang, Luofeng, Igrec, Bojan, Thomas, Giles
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: ASME 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152787/1/Thomas_OMAE-21-1172-Accepted%20Manuscript.pdf
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152787/
Description
Summary:Global warming has extensively transformed Arctic sea ice from continuous level-ice coverage to unconsolidated ice floe fields. Whilst the ice floes have a mixture of different sizes and their locations are randomly distributed, contemporary computational models lack effective methods to generate floe fields with such a natural pattern. This work introduces two original tools that can generate realistic ice floe fields for computational models. They are a sequential generator that sequentially handles ice floes one by one, and a genetic generator based upon a genetic algorithm. Demonstration of the tools is given, presenting samples of generating various shapes of floes and arbitrary mixtures of different shapes. Furthermore, an example is provided that combines the generated floe field with computational work modeling a ship transiting in ice floes. In addition, the source code of the tools is sharable to the public.