A field study of suspended frazil ice particles

The paper explores fundamental relationships between air temperature, water temperature including supercooling, wind, water depth and velocity, surface ice floe concentration and thickness, mean suspended frazil concentration and anchor ice thickness. The paper ends with a discussion of the fundamental inter-dependency between the size of frazil ice particles and the Rouse number. This leads to the hypothesis that the dominant Rouse number of most river flows will normally be close to Z ≈ 0.4. Furthermore, it proposes that the size of the frazil ice particles in a water body is controlled, at its lower end, by its basic size distribution during formation and, at the upper end, by the limiting rise velocity corresponding to Z ≈ 0.8. Finally, it suggests that the size distribution of frazil particles situated under the surface floes, and therefore available for entrainment, depends on the time-history of turbulent conditions encountered during the ice floe's voyage.