An attempt at multibeam imaging of laboratory sea ice

Sea ice was grown in a wave tank at the Hamburgische Schiffbau-Versuchsanstalt GmbH (HSVA) in Hamburg, Germany from December 12-20, 2013 as part of an EU-funded effort to understand the behavior of crude oil under sea ice. As an add-on to that experiment, we borrowed a Teledyne ODOM MB1 multibeam sonar that works in the frequency range from 170 to 220 kHz, mounted it on a moveable trolly, and collected beamformed and time series data with it looking upward at sea ice grown under various conditions.The water depth between the sonar transducer and the bottom of the sea ice was shallower than expected so the sonar was operating in the vicinity of the near field boundary. The experimental setup, data processing methods, and results will be presented in this poster.