Journal topic
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2020-134
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2020-134

Submitted as: research article 14 May 2020

Submitted as: research article | 14 May 2020

Review status
This preprint is currently under review for the journal TC.

Toward a method for downscaling sea ice pressure

Jean-Francois Lemieux1, Bruno Tremblay2, and Mathieu Plante2 Jean-Francois Lemieux et al.
• 2Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, McGill University, Montréal, Qc, Canada

Abstract. Sea ice pressure poses great risk for navigation; it can lead to ship besetting and damages. Contemporary large-scale sea ice forecasting systems can predict the evolution of sea ice pressure. There is, however, a mismatch between the spatial resolution of these systems (a few km) and the typical dimensions of ships (a few tens of m) navigating in ice-covered regions. In this paper, we investigate the downscaling of sea ice pressure from the km-scale to scales relevant for ships. Results show that sub-grid scale pressure values can be significantly larger than the large-scale pressure (up to $\sim$ 4x larger in our numerical experiments). High pressure at the sub-grid scale is associated with the presence of defects (e.g. a lead). Numerical experiments show that a ship creates its own high stress concentration by forming a lead in its wake while navigating. These results also highlight the difficulty of forecasting the small-scale distribution of pressure and especially the largest values. Indeed, this distribution strongly depends on variables that are not well constrained: the rheology parameters and the small-scale structure of sea ice thickness (more importantly the length of the lead behind the ship).

Jean-Francois Lemieux et al.

Interactive discussion

Status: open (until 09 Jul 2020)
Status: open (until 09 Jul 2020)
AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment
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Jean-Francois Lemieux et al.

Model code and software

Stress boundary conditions for the McGill sea ice model J.-F. Lemieux, B. Tremblay, and M. Plante https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3803452

Jean-Francois Lemieux et al.

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