2004: A continuum anisotropic model of sea ice dynamics

• Main Authors: Er V. Wilchinsky, Daniel L. Feltham
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: sea ice; anisotropic; plastic; flawed continuum; rheology; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.570.501; http://www.cpom.org/people/dlf/continuumanisotropicmodel.pdf

We develop the essential ingredients of a new, continuum and anisotropic model of sea-ice dynamics designed for eventual use in climate simulation. These ingredients are a constitutive law for sea-ice stress, relating stress to the material properties of sea ice and to internal variables describing the sea-ice state, and equations describ-ing the evolution of these variables. The sea-ice cover is treated as a densely flawed two-dimensional continuum consisting of a uniform field of thick ice that is uniformly permeated with narrow linear regions of thinner ice called leads. Lead orientation, thickness and width distributions are described by second-rank tensor internal vari-ables: the structure, thickness and width tensors, whose dynamics are governed by corresponding evolution equations accounting for processes such as new lead gen-eration and rotation as the ice cover deforms. These evolution equations contain contractions of higher-order tensor expressions that require closures. We develop a sea-ice stress constitutive law that relates sea-ice stress to the structure tensor, thick-ness tensor and strain rate. For the special case of empty leads (containing no ice), linear closures are adopted and we present calculations for simple shear, convergence and divergence.