The Ice Data Hub as a powerful interface between data and simulations

• Main Authors: Boxberg, Marc S., Simson, Anna, Chen, Qian, Kowalski, Julia
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Taylor Glacier; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?gldocs-11858/10510

Providing measurements for scientific simulation software often requires tedious manual preprocessing of data sets. To overcome this problem and make it easy for simulation tools to access heterogeneous data sets directly, we have developed the Ice Data Hub. The Ice Data Hub combines available data from Earth or other planetary bodies including their meta data and allows it to be displayed, interpreted and exported. Most important is its functionality as an interface between data and simulation tools. For example, we develop models for thermodynamic melting processes that can evaluate measured data directly thanks to the Ice Data Hub. It can also be used as a black box, where a simulation tool queries the Hub to provide a property. This could, for example, be a material property at a certain depth. The accessing functionality for the user is wrapped in the sense that the user uses similar routines, regardless the format of data, e.g., analytical expression, look-up table or interpolant. To illustrate the capabilities of the Ice Data Hub, we show results of 1) thermal conductivity simulations in glacial ice with temperature data from Langenferner Glacier, Italy, and 2) trajectory models of ice melting probes compared with housekeeping data from field experiments at Taylor Glacier, Antarctica. 1) The observed temperature evolution from a measured time series of 1D temperature observations in an interval of one hour differs from the theoretically predicted temperature evolution, which was determined on the basis of an idealised seasonal and diurnal temperature variation at the surface and constant ice material parameters. Hence, we reconstruct spatio-temporally varying effective material parameters from these observations using the Crank Nicolson Method. 2) Ice melting probes are developed to penetrate ice and access potential subglacial water reservoirs for insitu studies. The ice-sheet transit provides an excellent opportunity to study the structure and composition of the ice itself using geophysical and other ...