An elastic plate model for wave attenuation and ice floe breaking in the marginal ice zone

Abstract

We present a model for wave attenuation in the marginal ice zone (MIZ) based on a two‐dimensional (one horizontal and one vertical dimension) multiple floating elastic plate solution in the frequency domain, which is solved exactly using a matched eigenfunction expansion. The only physical parameters that enter the model are length, mass, and elastic stiffness (of which, the latter two depend primarily on thickness) of the ice floes. The model neglects all nonlinear effects as well as floe collisions or ice creep and is therefore most applicable to floes which are large compared to the thickness and to wave conditions which are not extreme. The solution for a given arrangement of floes is fully coherent, and the results are therefore dependent on the exact geometry. We firstly show that this dependence can be removed by averaging over a distribution of floe lengths (we choose the Rayleigh distribution). We then show that after this averaging, the attenuation coefficient is a function of floe number and independent of floe length, provided the floe lengths are sufficiently large. The model predicts an exponential decay of energy, just as is shown experimentally. This enables us to provide explicit values for the attenuation coefficient, as a function of the average floe thickness and wave period. We compare our theoretical predictions of the wave attenuation with measured data and other scattering models. The limited data allows us to conclude that our model is applicable to large floes for short to medium wave periods (6 to 15 seconds). We also derive a floe breaking model, based on our wave attenuation model, which indicates that we are under‐predicting the attenuation coefficients at long periods.