The attenuation rates of ocean waves in the marginal ice zone

Abstract

During field operations in the Greenland and Bering Seas in 1978, 1979 and 1983, a number of experiments were carried out in which wave energy was measured along a line of stations running from the open sea deep into an icefield. Wave buoys in the water and accelerometer packages on floes were the instruments employed, with airborne vertical photography to supply information on floe size distribution. It was found that the decay of waves is exponential, with a decay coefficient which generally increases with frequency except for a roll‐over at the highest frequencies. The observations can be fitted reasonably well to a theory of one‐dimensional scattering.