Improving numerical accuracy for the viscous-plastic formulation of sea ice ...

• Main Authors: Li, Tongtong, Gelb, Anne, Lee, Yoonsang
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2022
• Subjects: Numerical Analysis math.NA; Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics physics.ao-ph; FOS Mathematics; FOS Physical sciences; Breaker; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2206.10061; https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10061

Accurate modeling of sea ice dynamics is critical for predicting environmental variables and is important in applications such as navigating ice breaker ships. Research for both modeling and simulating sea ice dynamics is ongoing, with the most widely accepted model based on the viscous-plastic (VP) formulation introduced by Hibler in 1979. Due to its highly nonlinear features, this model is intrinsically challenging for computational solvers. In particular, sea ice simulations often significantly differ from satellite observations. This study therefore focuses on improving the numerical accuracy of the VP sea ice model. Since the poor convergence observed in existing numerical simulations stems from the nonlinear nature of the VP formulation, this investigation proposes using the celebrated weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme -- as opposed to the frequently employed centered difference (CD) scheme -- for the spatial derivatives in the VP sea ice model. We then proceed to numerically ...