Bering Sea storms introduce various environmental conditions that adversely affect human activity and infrastructure in the coastal zone and the ecosystems they depend upon. Storm impacts include interactions with sea ice in all potential states: large floes, shore-fast ice, and incipient sea-ice in frazil or slush state. In particular, sea ice can act to enhance or mitigate the impacts of adverse marine state, even as the event is occurring. Such occurrences should be part of a forecasting regimen, however scientific work has not been conducted on this phenomena, with the result that a physical model describing the formation of slush ice berms does not exist. To arrive at such a model requires visits to and input from local communities. It is the purpose of this research to develop such a physical descriptive model by analyzing observational data obtained from several community visits.
