Wave-induced iceberg motion: Fid-Bau Portal

Wave-induced iceberg motion

Lever, J.H. / Klein, K. / Mitchell, D. / Diemand, D.

AbstractThis paper describes the results of a three-year field study to measure the wave-induced motion of icebergs. We sought this information to examine how well iceberg velocities, derived using wave-tank tests, reflect those of irregularly shaped full-scale icebergs. We deployed self-contained motion-monitoring packages on icebergs in the Labrador Sea and on the Grand Banks, and obtained 19 data sets of wave-induced iceberg motion. To our knowledge, these are the only available data describing the wave-induced motion of full-scale icebergs in six degrees-of-freedom.For comparison with laboratory results, we computed normalized significant surge and heave iceberg velocities and plotted these against normalized peak wavelength. This demonstrated that velocities based on wave-tank study of four regularly shaped model icebergs do reflect the range of variation in iceberg motion attributable to random shape. The paper concludes that iceberg significant velocities are random quantities for a given size iceberg in a given sea state, and that a gamma probability density, fitted to wave-tank results, is suitable for describing their variations.