Mark A. Hopkins
u4ri9mah@crrel.usace.army.mil
US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, Hanover, NH, USA
The ice pack covering northern seas is composed of a granular aggregate of multi-year and first year ice parcels and open water. Existing ice-ocean models of the Arctic ice pack are large-scale continuum models that use a plastic yield surface to characterize the constitutive behavior of the pack. An alternative approach, which captures far more detail, is to explicitly model the ice parcels that make up the ice pack. To this end a granular model of the central Arctic ice pack has been developed. In the granular model each floe is a continuum having its own ice thickness distribution. Small-scale behavior such as thermodynamic ice growth and melt, wind and water drag, and pressure ridging are incorporated via parameterizations derived from field observations and computer simulations. Simulations performed with the granular model successfully reproduce the general deformation patterns visible in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images captured during the recently completed SHEBA field experiment. The model is demonstrated and described at :