Abstract
Wave-ice interactions are critical for correctly modelling air-sea
exchanges and ocean surface processes in polar regions. While the role
of sea ice in damping open-water swell waves has received considerable
research interest, the impact of sea ice on locally generated wind-wave
growth in partial ice cover remains uncertain. The current approach in
spectral wave models is to scale the wind input term by the open-water
fraction, \(1-\phi\), for \(\phi\) the sea
ice concentration (SIC), but this neglects the impact of subgrid-scale
patterns of sea ice coverage in limiting fetch for wind-wave growth.
Here, we use the spectral wave model SWAN to simulate wave growth in
realistic, synthetic fields of explicitly resolved sea ice floes over a
range of SICs and floe size distributions (FSDs). Through geometric
arguments, we show that the fetch available for wind-wave growth, and
thus the resulting wave statistics, depends on a combination of the SIC
and the FSD. The combination of geometric scaling and empirical wave
laws allows the prediction of bulk wave statistics as a function of SIC,
a characteristic floe size, and wind speed. We show that due to the
difference in spectral character from attenuated propagating open-ocean
swell, these waves may have an outsized impact on ocean mixing regimes.