Simulating sea ice drift in the Southern Ocean incorporating real wind data using the LSFEM

Abstract

The viscous‐plastic sea ice model of [2] describes the motion of sea ice on large scales. The numerical model of the sea ice drift considers velocities and stresses and is coupled with the field quantities ice thickness and ice concentration, which are modeled by transient advection equations. Here, the viscosity in sense of a non‐Newtonian fluid depends on velocity gradients, as well as on ice concentration and ice thickness. This leads to a strong nonlinearity of the constitutive model. In [8], we discussed the hurdles of large scale sea ice models and possible solutions of an implementation within a least‐squares finite element method (LSFEM). Previous studies on sea ice model implementations have shown that the LSFEM is a promising solution to the numerically difficult problem, cf. [9] and [7]. In this work, another essential aspect of sea ice research comes into play: embedding real data into the numerical solution is an important field of research in sea ice and ocean modeling. Here, we show a 2D boundary value problem for simulating sea ice drift in the Southern Ocean incorporating real wind data from the ERA‐5 project [1].