Sea Ice Rheology Experiment (SIREx): 1. Scaling and Statistical Properties of Sea‐Ice Deformation Fields

• Published in: Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans
• Main Authors: Bouchat, Amélie, Hutter, Nils, Chanut, Jérôme, Dupont, Frédéric, Dukhovskoy, Dmitry, Garric, Gilles, Lee, Younjoo J., Lemieux, Jean‐François, Lique, Camille, Losch, Martin, Maslowski, Wieslaw, Myers, Paul G., Ólason, Einar, Rampal, Pierre, Rasmussen, Till, Talandier, Claude, Tremblay, Bruno, Wang, Qiang
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Sea ice
• 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

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.