Dynamics Of Floating Ice

Polar regions, and the Arctic in particular, have become the focus of increased research in the last 10 years. Changes in the climate alongside technological developments are creating new opportunities in these regions for human activities, including sustainable development of resource-based industries, fishing, tourism, and faster shipping routes between Europe and Asia. Improved scientific understanding of the Arctic environment will lead to improved prediction of sea ice hazards for human activities and, therefore, will naturally produce increased value in polar regions, while doing so in a safer and more environmental-friendly way. In this project, we want to develop methodology that will lead to safer human operations in the arctic seas. Main topics of investigation: -Develop autonomous sensors adapted to polar regions, that will allow monitoring of 3D motion of floating ice and icebergs, on-board processing, and satellite communications. -Investigate the sources of energy dissipation under sea ice, which is an important element for wave damping by sea ice, and must be investigated in more detail to allow better predictions of waves in a changing Arctic Ocean. -Develop methods and theories to monitor 3D dynamics of icebergs, allowing surveillance of iceberg drift and analysis of iceberg stability, which is necessary for iceberg towing. -Investigate the dynamics of icebergs affected by waves, currents and wind using numerical modelling (computational fluid dynamics (CFD)); both commercial and research codes. -Develop a simulation package, in collaboration with the Norwegian Meteorological institute, to improve forecasts of ice drift with a focus on better operation safety in the Arctic. Research group; -University of Alaska; Mark Johnson -CEMEF Mines-ParisTech; Thierry Coupez -University Center in Svalbard; Aleksey Marchenko -Norwegian Meteorological institute;Kai Christensen, Jean Rabault -University of Oslo; Yiyi Whitchelo, Trygve Løken, Reyna Ramirez, Jan Erik Weber, Olav Gundersen og Atle Jensen In the context of the DOFI project, we have developed a fully open source wave in ice instrument, which is able to track both the drift of polar ice, and perform highly accurate measurements of waves propagating in the ice, down to an amplitude of just a few millimeters. The general design has been validated through a pilot study in Svalbard, and following cross-validation of the accuracy of the measurements against established methodologies, 4 deployments have been performed. The first deployment was performed in the context of the Nansen legacy project, in the Northern Barents sea in 2018. The second and third deployments took place late winter 2019 / early 2020 in the Arctic and Antarctic, respectively, and were performed by an Australian group that decided to use our design for their research. The fourth deployment took place over the summer 2020, again in the Northern Barents sea. The data collected, both ice drift trajectories and waves in ice measurements, are currently being used for calibrating numerical models at The Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Two of these sensors were found on Iceland in 2021 and 2022. All the raw data is stored locally on the sensors. These sensors will be retrieved and it will be exciting to investigate all the data collected. A new transport model for the MIZ were developed with two new key features aimed to help mitigate uncertainties in ice and ocean prediction systems. This new transport model is found to reduce the error by a factor of 2 to 3 for drifters furthest in the MIZ using icebased transport models. Main results; -new mathematical model - two layer model for wave dissipation in sea ice; Sutherland et al. (2019) -new version of the wave sensor; satellite communication, solar power and on-board processing of data - deployed now in Arctic and Antartica. -3 MSc students working on DOFI topics. -Trygve Løken defended his PhD on the 24th of September 2021 and is now an Assoc. Prof at Nord University. -CFD simulations on wave/body interaction ongoing in-house and together with our French partners. 56 articles are published in scientific journals, 7 popular articles and 12 talks are given at international conferences/workshops.

A new transport model is developed and will reduce the error by a factor of 2 to 3 for drifters furthest in the MIZ using ice-based transport models in trajectory location after 48h. Furthermore, in this project, we released the next iteration of our open-source drifter and wave-monitoring instrument, which follows these solution aspects. The new design is significantly less expensive (typically by a factor of 5 compared with our previous, already cost-effective instrument), much easier to build and assemble for people without specific microelectronics and programming competence, more easily extendable and customizable, and two orders of magnitude more power-efficient (to the point where solar panels are no longer needed even for long-term deployments).

We will study the dynamics of floating ice in order to allow better risk management of human activities in the Arctic. The main milestones of the project will be to: - Develop affordable instruments that measure waves and 3D dynamics of icebergs, process the data in-situ, and transmit the processed data by satellite. This will allow for the assessment in real time of the stability of icebergs regarding the risk of tipping when operations such as towing are to be performed. - Investigate the damping of waves by sea ice, to allow further developments of models for wave predictions in the polar regions. - Develop models describing the 3D dynamics of thick ice floes and icebergs, to improve predictions of icebergs drift and tipping, and therefore help reduce risks for human activity. We will use the combination of theory, field measurements, and laboratory experiments, to improve the current state of knowledge of ocean-ice dynamics. We will help improve the ability to predict ice hazards for human activities in the Arctic.