Sea ice melting in the marginal ice zone

The heat and salt flux boundary conditions together with the freezing curve relationship are a necessary component of any ice-sea water thermodynamic model. A neutral two-layer oceanic planetary boundary layer model that incorporates these boundary conditions gives the following results: The interfacial salinity is within 10% of the far-field salinity for conditions commonly encountered in the MIZ and depends only on the turbulent Lewis number and the far-field temperature and salinity. The predicted melt rates agree with the limited field observations, of the order of 1 m day⁻¹. The Obukov lengths, determined from the predicted interface conditions and melt rates, are generally much greater than the Ekman layer thicknesses; hence, the surface buoyancy flux has little effect on the turbulence in the planetary boundary layer.