Abstract. Phenomena involving frozen soil or rock are important in many natural systems and, as a consequence, there is a great interest in the modeling of their behavior. Few models exist that describe this process for both saturated and unsaturated soil and in conditions of freezing and thawing, as the energy equation shows strongly non-linear characteristics and is often difficult to handle with normal methods of iterative integration. Therefore in this paper we propose a method for solving the energy equation in freezing soil. The solver is linked with the solution of Richards equation, and is able to approximate water movement in unsaturated soils and near the liquid-solid phase transition. A globallyconvergent Newton method has been implemented to achieve robust convergence of this scheme. The method is tested by comparison with an analytical solution to the Stefan problem and by comparison with experimental data derived from the literature.
Abstract. GEOtop is a fine-scale grid-based simulator that represents the heat and water budgets at and below the soil surface. It describes the three-dimensional water flow in the soil and the energy exchange with the atmosphere, considering the radiative and turbulent fluxes. Furthermore, it reproduces the highly non-linear interactions between the water and energy balance during soil freezing and thawing, and simulates the temporal evolution of the water and energy budgets in the snow cover and their effect on soil temperature. Here, we present the core components of GEOtop 2.0 and demonstrate its functioning. Based on a synthetic simulation, we show that the interaction of processes represented in GEOtop 2.0 can result in phenomena that are significant and relevant for applications involving permafrost and seasonally frozen soils, both in high altitude and latitude regions.
Abstract. GEOtop is a small-scale grid-based simulator that represents the heat and water budgets at and below the soil surface. It represents the energy exchange with the atmosphere, considering the radiative and turbulent fluxes, and describes the three-dimensional subsurface water flow. Furthermore, it reproduces the highly non-linear interaction of the water and energy balance during soil freezing and thawing, and describes the temporal evolution of water and energy budgets in the snow cover and their effect on soil temperature. Here, we describe the core components of GEOtop 2.0 and demonstrate its functioning. Based on a synthetic simulation, we show that the interaction of processes represented in GEOtop 2.0 can result in phenomena that are significant and relevant for applications involving permafrost and seasonally-frozen soils, both in high altitude and latitude regions.
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