Verg, that pdf is dated 1985, thirty years ago. What possible relevance could that have to modern reports, cited above, of swells
interacting with pack ice that no one on this forum troubles themselves to read?
The two recent studies on the Beaufort event describe an event observed before, during, and after with a very heavily instrumented ship -- this is completely unprecedented. Maybe start with reading those. Full text.
I'm thinking
we should delete this entire forum and start over with an active moderator. The open water reach has become much longer in August and September in the Arctic Ocean these days and the opportunities for breaking up pack ice much greater. This is an important new negative feedback on Arctic Ocean ice and
one that deserves better.
Commentary on sea wave and swell so far has been not been at the level of the respective wikipedia articles. We are
aiming a bit higher than that on these forums. At a bare minimum, people need to learn how to do Google Scholar searches to locate and read full text scientific articles on this topic from the last 2-3 years -- these will better explain current thinking and review all earlier work.
The great thing about this topic is Arctic open reach is so new that a half dozen papers about covers it. So folks, ok to ask questions but not ok to post personal musings until AFTER you have READ these few. (I'm getting about as exasperated as AbruptSLR on the methane forum!)
To learn what a swell really means in terms of a 3000 m moored buoy with upward looking sonar observing waves 50 m above in the Beaufort, here is a
reader-friendly one -- and it's only FOUR PAGES (sampler below).
There you can learn how scientists unwrap actual waves into their wave energy spectra by fourier transform and determine 'significant wave height' as 4 * square root in sea surface elevation variance at moderate frequency, etc. etc. etc.
Wave theory gets real complicated in a hurry. Spare me your thoughts on that, years ago I was teaching nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations -- cnoidal waves, solitons, KdV and all that, not in some 1834 English canal but rather non-abelian Yang-Mills vacua. Here we just want to touch on the most basic basics of wind waves in deep water.
Once a wave train hits an ice pack heterogenous in so many ways, forget it -- theory is worthless (for lack of specifiable boundary conditions). Fortunately we have a few outstanding observations of what actually happens next.
But best of all, thanks to Asplin 2014, we don't actually need a ship out there anymore because we know when and where major wind events are happening so with Radarsat/Sentinel we can maybe monitor the aftermath directly on floe size and predict enhanced lateral melt.
1.
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pubs/2014/rogers2-2014.pdf2. 10.1002/2013JC009557 Implications of fractured Arctic perennial ice cover on thermodynamic and dynamic sea ice processes. MG Asplin et al