INTRODUCTION

The development of oil and gas projects and the increase in the offshore drilling operations in the north-eastern Sakhalin shelf has placed demands for a more detailed information about basic hydrological and meteorological parameters of the "atmosphere-snow-cover-ice-water" system and sea-ice prediction model. Meteorological and sea-ice studies were carried out on a landfast sea-ice floe at Chaivo Bay on north-eastern Sakhalin as a part of a Japan-Russia co-operative research project, "Sea Ice Studies of the Okhotsk Sea Coast of Sakhalin". A thermodynamic modelling of first-year sea ice is founded on model of R.Gabison [1] and is adopted to north-eastern Sakhalin meteorological conditions. The model is first assessed diagnostically by studying its sensitivity to changes in air temperature, in solar radiation, in surface wind, and in snow cover. The results are analysed for internal consistency with observational evidence.

1. EXPERIMENTAL OBSERVATIONS

An experimental site was located on the fast sea ice in the Kleye Strait between the Chaivo Bay and the Sea of Okhotsk, 200 m apart from a field research station operated by the Institute of Oil and Gas Industry (Fig.1). On the experimental site, meteorological conditions (air temperature, relative. humidity, wind speed, wing direction, solar radiation and reflection radiation) were recorded by a data logger at an interval of 30minutes (Table 1). To know the development of sea-ice by the difference in temperature at the ice-water interface, time series of ice and water temperature were recorded at 16 depth between the ice surface and 70cm below the surface, being in sea-water, by another data logger at an interval of 1 hour. Simultaneously, time series of snow and air temperature were recorded at 16 heights between the ice-snow interface and 63cm above, being in air, by the third data logger at an interval of 1 hour, to obtain the information of snow accumulation on the sea ice.

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