Estimates of dissipation of wave energy by sea ice for a field experiment in the Southern Ocean, using model/data inversion

TL;DR

This study uses a model-data inversion with WAVEWATCH III to estimate wave energy dissipation by sea ice in the Southern Ocean, providing a large dataset of dissipation profiles and analyzing their variability and correlation with ice properties.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale inversion approach to quantify frequency-dependent wave energy dissipation by sea ice using observational data and modeling, with detailed analysis of dissipation profiles.

Findings

Mean dissipation profiles fit well with simple binomials.

Dissipation variability is significant but shows qualitative similarity to prior estimates.

Power dependence aligns with theoretical models involving shear-induced turbulence.

Abstract

A model-data inversion is applied to a very large observational dataset collected in the Southern Ocean north of the Ross Sea during late autumn to early winter, producing estimates of the frequency-dependent rate of dissipation by sea ice. The modeling platform is WAVEWATCH III(R) which accounts for non-stationarity, advection, wave generation, and other relevant processes. The resulting 9477 dissipation profiles are co-located with other variables such as ice thickness to quantify correlations which might be exploited in later studies to improve predictions. Mean dissipation profiles from the inversion are fitted to simple binomials. Variability about the mean profile is not small, but the binomials show remarkable qualitative similarity to prior observation-based estimates of dissipation, and the power dependence is consistent with at least three theoretical models, one of which assumes that dissipation is dominated by turbulence generated by shear at the ice-water interface.