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

• Published in: Geoscientific Model Development
• Main Authors: Robinson, A., Alvarez-Solas, J., Montoya, M., Goelzer, H., Greve, R., Ritz, C.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctic; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://publications.pik-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_25224; https://publications.pik-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_25224_1/component/file_25225/25224oa.pdf

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.