Solidification effects of snowfall on sea-ice freeze-up: results from an onsite experimental study

Abstract

Although the effects of snow during sea-ice growth have been investigated for sea ice which is thick enough to accommodate dry snow, those for thin sea ice have not been paid much attention due to the difficulty in observing them. Observations are complicated by the presence of slush and its subsequent freeze-up, and the surface heat budget might be sensitive to the additional ice thickness. An onsite short-term land fast sea-ice freeze-up experiment in the Saroma-ko Lagoon, Hokkaido, Japan was carried out to examine the effects of snowfall on the structure and surface heat budget of thin sea ice, based on observational results and a 1-D thermodynamic model. We found that snowfall contributes to the solidification of the surface slush layer, contributing ice thickness that is comparable to the snowfall amount and affecting the crystal texture significantly. On the other hand, the basal ice growth rate and turbulent heat flux were not significantly affected, being <3.1 × 10−8 m s−1 and 3 W m−2, respectively. This finding may validate the omission in past studies of snow effect in estimating ice production rates in polynyas and has implications about the reconstruction of growth history from sample analysis.

Keywords

• Crystal alignments
• freeze-up process
• snowfall effect
• surface heat budget
• thermodynamic ice growth model
• thin sea ice