Description and validation of the ice-sheet model Yelmo (version 1.0)

• Published in: Geoscientific Model Development
• Main Authors: A. Robinson, J. Alvarez-Solas, M. Montoya, H. Goelzer, R. Greve, C. Ritz
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2020
• Subjects: Geology; QE1-996.5; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-2805-2020; https://doaj.org/article/0ef44a91b9e541af993087296631f600

We describe the physics and features of the ice-sheet model Yelmo, an open-source project intended for collaborative development. Yelmo is a thermomechanical model, solving for the coupled velocity and temperature solutions of an ice sheet simultaneously. The ice dynamics are currently treated via a “hybrid” approach combining the shallow-ice and shallow-shelf/shelfy-stream approximations, which makes Yelmo an apt choice for studying a wide variety of problems. Yelmo's main innovations lie in its flexible and user-friendly infrastructure, which promotes portability and facilitates long-term development. In particular, all physics subroutines have been designed to be self-contained, so that they can be easily ported from Yelmo to other models, or easily replaced by improved or alternate methods in the future. Furthermore, hard-coded model choices are eschewed, replaced instead with convenient parameter options that allow the model to be adapted easily to different contexts. We show results for different ice-sheet benchmark tests, and we illustrate Yelmo's performance for the Antarctic ice sheet.