Development of a Higher-Order Ice Sheet Model Using a Rescaled Coordinate System

• Main Authors: James Fishbaugh, Jesse V Johnson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; Greenland; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1080.9992; http://www.cs.utah.edu/%7Ejfishbau/docs/poster.pdf

Abstract The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated between 9 and 88cm of sea level rise over the next hundred years. Of this, only negative 19 to 11cm is attributed to the largest ice masses on the planet, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Over the last decade, dramatic activity in the outlet glaciers of Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula raise the possibility that these large ice sheets will have a much greater contribution to sea level rise over the next century than was predicted by the IPCC. Recent studies have shown these areas are exhibiting decadal scale changes in response to climate forcings, whereas IPCC models show that ice is not responsive to climate change over such short periods of time. Many believe the IPCC type models fail to show short term climate responses due to the simplifications they make to ice sheet mechanics. Here, we develop a higher order model -a new ice sheet model which contains all relevant flow physics. In addition, we use a rescaled coordinate system to simplify domain geometry, adding simplicity, flexibility, and robustness to the model. Our hope is that this scheme allows us to reevaluate sea level change and revisit the estimations made by the IPCC. Our immediate focus is validation and verification of our model around a structured set of experiments.