Comparison of elastic-viscous-plastic and viscous-plastic dynamics models using a high resolution Arctic sea ice model

• Main Authors: Hunke, E. C., Zhang, Y.
• Other Authors: United States. Department of Energy. Office of Energy Research.
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Los Alamos National Laboratory 1997
• Subjects: Arctic Ocean; Mathematical Models; Icebergs; 54 Environmental Sciences; Theoretical Data; Comparative Evaluations; Dynamics; Rheology; Climates; Arctic; Iceberg*; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2172/563300; https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc691538/

A nonlinear viscous-plastic (VP) rheology proposed by Hibler (1979) has been demonstrated to be the most suitable of the rheologies commonly used for modeling sea ice dynamics. However, the presence of a huge range of effective viscosities hinders numerical implementations of this model, particularly on high resolution grids or when the ice model is coupled to an ocean or atmosphere model. Hunke and Dukowicz (1997) have modified the VP model by including elastic waves as a numerical regularization in the case of zero strain rate. This modification (EVP) allows an efficient, fully explicit discretization that adapts well to parallel architectures. The authors present a comparison of EVP and VP dynamics model results from two 5-year simulations of Arctic sea ice, obtained with a high resolution sea ice model. The purpose of the comparison is to determine how differently the two dynamics models behave, and to decide whether the elastic-viscous-plastic model is preferable for high resolution climate simulations, considering its high efficiency in parallel computation. Results from the first year of this experiment (1990) are discussed in detail in Hunke and Zhang (1997).