Past, present and impendent hydroelastic challenges in the polar and subpolar seas

Abstract

Current and emergent advances are examined on the topic of hydroelasticity theory applied to natural sea ice responding to the action of ocean surface waves and swell, with attention focused on methods that portray sea ice more faithfully as opposed to those that oversimplify interactions with a poor imitation of reality. A succession of authors have confronted and solved by various means the demanding applied mathematics associated with ocean waves (i) entering a vast sea-ice plate, (ii) travelling between plates of different thickness, (iii) impinging on a pressure ridge, (iv) affecting a single ice floe with arbitrarily specified physical and material properties, and (v) many such features or mixtures thereof. The next step is to embed simplified versions of these developments in an oceanic general circulation model for forecasting purposes. While targeted on specific sea-ice situations, many of the reported results are equally applicable to the interaction of waves with very large floating structures, such as pontoons, floating airports and mobile offshore bases.

Hydraulic falls under a floating ice plate due to submerged obstructions

“…However, the linear theory fails when the moving load is near critical speed. Further, Squire (2011) provides detailed insight into how global warming can have significant effects † Email address for correspondence: e.parau@uea.ac.uk Hydraulic falls under a floating ice plate due to submerged obstructions 209 on the Antarctic and Arctic sea-ice conditions due to, for example, warmer summers resulting in increased melting of the ice and thus rougher sea conditions. The linear theory is therefore becoming increasingly limited, and so nonlinear models have been developed.…”

Wave-induced stress and breaking of sea ice in a coupled hydrodynamic discrete-element wave–ice model

“…Parameterizations of waveice interactions for large-scale continuum models (i.e., those in which ice is treated as a continuous mass rather than as discrete particles) are crucial for further development of those models. However, although appreciable effort has been made in that direction in recent years (Dumont et al, 2011;Doble and Bidlot, 2013;Squire et al, 2013;Williams et al, 2013Williams et al, , 2017; The WAVEWATCH III®Development Group , WW3-DG; Bennetts et al, 2017), our understanding of many aspects of wave-ice interactions is still too limited to allow formulating such parameterizations, especially those suitable for a wide range of conditions. Strong fragmentation of the in the above-mentioned parameterizations by Williams et al (2013), Bennetts et al (2017), and others.…”

Comparison of viscoelastic‐type models for ocean wave attenuation in ice‐covered seas

“…The scattering process is conservative as it redistributes the wave energy spatially, so waves penetrating ice fields are gradually reflected, causing an apparent exponential decay of wave energy with distance from the ice edge. Much attention has been given to the development of realistic wave scattering models and extracting an attenuation coefficient characterizing the decay of wave energy (see the review papers of Squire et al [1995] and Squire [2007Squire [ , 2011 for a comprehensive discussion). A number of nonconservative physical processes, such as wave breaking, floe collisions and overrafting, turbulence, overwash, and sea ice roughness and inelasticity, induce additional decay of wave energy.…”