Abstract. Employing a one-dimensional, coupled thermal and hydraulic numerical model, we quantitatively analyze high-resolution, multi-year data from the active layers at two contrasting permafrost sites. The model implements heat conduction with the de Vries parameterization, heat convection with water and vapor flow, freeze-thaw transition parameterized with a heuristic soil-freezing characteristic, and liquid water flow with the Mualem-van Genuchten parameterization. The model is driven by measured temperatures and water contents at the upper and lower boundary with all required material properties deduced from the measured data. The aims are (i) to ascertain the applicability of such a rather simple model, (ii) to quantify the dominating processes, and (iii) to discuss possible causes of remaining deviations.Soil temperatures and water contents as well as characteristic quantities like thaw depth and duration of the isothermal plateau could be reproduced. Heat conduction is found to be the dominant process by far at both sites, with nonconductive transport contributing a maximum of some 3 % to the mean heat flux at the Spitsbergen site, most of the time very much less, and practically negligible at the Tibetan site. Hypotheses discussed to explain the remaining deviations between measured and simulated state variables include, besides some technical issues, infiltration of snow Correspondence to: K. Roth (kurt.roth@iup.uni-heidelberg.de) melt, dry cracking with associated vapor condensation, and mechanical soil expansion in detail.
Matrix-free finite element implementations of massively parallel geometric multigrid save memory and are often significantly faster than implementations using classical sparse matrix techniques. They are especially well suited for hierarchical hybrid grids on polyhedral domains. In the case of constant coefficients all fine grid node stencils in the interior of a coarse macro element are equal. However, for non-polyhedral domains the situation changes. Then even for the Laplace operator, the non-linear element mapping leads to fine grid stencils that can vary from grid point to grid point. This observation motivates a new two-scale approach that exploits a piecewise polynomial approximation of the fine grid operator with respect to the coarse mesh size. The low-cost evaluation of these surrogate polynomials results in an efficient stencil assembly on-the-fly for non-polyhedral domains that can be significantly more efficient than matrix-free techniques that are based on an element-wise assembly. The performance analysis and additional hardware-aware code optimizations are based on the Execution-Cache-Memory model. Several aspects such as two-scale a priori error bounds and double discretization techniques are presented. Weak and strong scaling results illustrate the benefits of the new technique when used within large scale PDE solvers.Keywords. two-scale, massively parallel multigrid, matrix free, on-the-fly assembly, ECM-model, scaling results, surrogate operator 1 arXiv:1608.06473v1 [math.NA]
A variety of geologic observations point to fast upper mantle flow that may exceed plate tectonic velocities by an order of magnitude. At the same time there is mounting evidence from seismology for flow-like structures in the upper 100-200 km of the mantle. Here we present a set of geodynamic simulations to link these observations. In a synthetic setting, we include asthenospheric channels of varying thickness, with an extreme case of 100 km, and a significant viscosity contrast of up to 4 orders of magnitude relative to the deeper mantle. Using our new global high-resolution code TERRA-NEO, we obtain an increase in velocity by a factor of 10 between a 1000 km thick and the very thin channel, translating into velocities of ∼20 cm/a within the narrow asthenosphere. We further present and verify a simple Poiseuille flow model, predicting that the upper mantle velocity scales with the inverse of the asthenosphere thickness.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.