The objective of this work is to develop a short-term (in the order of days) ice hazard warning system for shallow, partially ice-covered waters. This system will vastly improve the present capability of accurately predicting the movement of individual ice floes, while retaining sufficient numerical efficiency so as to facilitate its use on small, e.g., shipborne, computers. The formulation of this system will couple the ice floe motion and the underlying water circulation, and will apply the Eulerian-Lagrangian concept of transport modelling to ice drift prediction. A detailed investigation of the range and variation of the drag coefficients at the ice surface and bottom will be carried out as well, so as to establish guidelines for estimating these coefficients under a variety of environmental conditions and for a range of ice floe characteristics.
