Transport of sea ice driven by fluctuating winds

The transport of sea ice on the ocean surface is driven by fluctuating winds and resisted by ocean drag. However, the relationship between transport properties of the ice and the stochasticity of the wind is poorly understood beyond steady-state drift. Here, we develop a Fokker-Planck-like framework for interacting ice floes driven by noisy winds. We model the wind noise as a stochastic process with a single correlation time, which in turn drives the motion of ice floes that interact through inelastic collisions. We show that particle-based simulations of the model quantitatively recover many observed statistical signatures of sea ice motion, including the dispersion coefficient, the velocity autocorrelation function, and the probability density of velocity fluctuations. We obtain analytic insight into these findings by developing a kinetic theory based on Boltzmann transport, and show that the observed features depend strongly on floe-floe interactions.