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Updated: Oct 11, 2025

Simulating Impacts of Ice Storms on Forest Ecosystems
Published on: June 30, 2020
Studies of periodic seawater spray icing with unilateral NMR
Shahla Ahmadi1, Andrés Ramírez Aguilera1, Bryce MacMillan1
1UNB MRI Centre, Department of Physics, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick E3B 5A3, Canada.
Abstract:
Sea water ice has a complicated pore structure consisting of brine-filled pockets within a solid ice matrix. In this work, an unilateral Nuclear Magnetic Resonance instrument was used to characterize the evolution of sea-ice brine inclusions in two types of ice: stationary seawater ice and seawater spray ice formed by periodic spraying on horizontal and vertical surfaces. The portable unilateral NMR was capable of measuring very low amounts of brine (<10% of the water-filled volume). CPMG experiments were performed to extract the information on brine content and T2 distribution at temperatures between -6 °C and -16 °C. 1D imaging was used to spatially resolve the ice brine accumulation. The results show that the seawater spray ice growth, brine content (greater for the horizontal orientation than for the vertical one), and T2 distribution (unimodal for stationary ice and bimodal for spray ice) depend on temperature and surface orientation.
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