Sea Ice Rheology Experiment (SIREx): 1. Scaling and Statistical Properties of Sea‐Ice Deformation Fields
As the sea-ice modeling community is shifting to advanced numerical frameworks, developing new sea-ice rheologies, and increasing model spatial resolution, ubiquitous deformation features in the Arctic sea ice are now being resolved by sea-ice models. Initiated at the Forum for Arctic Modeling and O...
Published in: | Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans |
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Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | unknown |
Published: |
2022
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/56511/ https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/56511/1/Bouchat_SIREx1_2022.pdf https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JC017667 https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.283a0846-f18f-4004-b41a-1f143f72df6b |
Summary: | As the sea-ice modeling community is shifting to advanced numerical frameworks, developing new sea-ice rheologies, and increasing model spatial resolution, ubiquitous deformation features in the Arctic sea ice are now being resolved by sea-ice models. Initiated at the Forum for Arctic Modeling and Observational Synthesis, the Sea Ice Rheology Experiment (SIREx) aims at evaluating state-of-the-art sea-ice models using existing and new metrics to understand how the simulated deformation fields are affected by different representations of sea-ice physics (rheology) and by model configuration. Part 1 of the SIREx analysis is concerned with evaluation of the statistical distribution and scaling properties of sea-ice deformation fields from 35 different simulations against those from the RADARSAT Geophysical Processor System (RGPS). For the first time, the viscous-plastic (and the elastic-viscous-plastic variant), elastic-anisotropic-plastic, and Maxwell-elasto-brittle rheologies are compared in a single study. We find that both plastic and brittle sea-ice rheologies have the potential to reproduce the observed RGPS deformation statistics, including multi-fractality. Model configuration (e.g., numerical convergence, atmospheric representation, spatial resolution) and physical parameterizations (e.g., ice strength parameters and ice thickness distribution) both have effects as important as the choice of sea-ice rheology on the deformation statistics. It is therefore not straightforward to attribute model performance to a specific rheological framework using current deformation metrics. In light of these results, we further evaluate the statistical properties of simulated Linear Kinematic Features in a SIREx Part 2 companion paper. |
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