Climate Modeling: Ocean Cavities below Ice Shelves

• Main Author: Petersen, Mark Roger
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; Ice Shelf; Ice Shelves; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1324560; https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1324560; https://doi.org/10.2172/1324560

The Accelerated Climate Model for Energy (ACME), a new initiative by the U.S. Department of Energy, includes unstructured-mesh ocean, land-ice, and sea-ice components using the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) framework. The ability to run coupled high-resolution global simulations efficiently on large, high-performance computers is a priority for ACME. Sub-ice shelf ocean cavities are a significant new capability in ACME, and will be used to better understand how changing ocean temperature and currents influence glacial melting and retreat. These simulations take advantage of the horizontal variable-resolution mesh and adaptive vertical coordinate in MPAS-Ocean, in order to place high resolution below ice shelves and near grounding lines.