Airborne and in-situ measurements of wave-ice interactions in the Lower St. Lawrence Estuary

Decreasing sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean is leading to an increase of surface wave energy.  This means that waves are becoming more important to Arctic dynamics, and so understanding their interactions with sea ice is a key question for Arctic oceanography. This work presents a unique set of simultaneous observations of wave-ice interactions during an episode of ice formation and wave generation. Airborne remote sensing observed the sea and ice surface using scanning lidar data, and infrared and hyperspectral imagery. Concurrently, an autonomous catamaran measured atmospheric fluxes, near-surface turbulence, temperature, and currents. During January 2023, this instrumentation was deployed in the fetch-limited natural laboratory of the Lower St. Lawrence Estuary in order to address the questions of how ice-forming conditions influence wave generation and how ice floes attenuate wave energy. These observations are used to develop understanding of the physics of wave-ice interactions and assess the ability of spectral wave models to reproduce them.  Implications for future models and larger-scale applications will be discussed.