SubZero: A Sea Ice Model With an Explicit Representation of the Floe Life Cycle

Manucharyan, Georgy E.; Montemuro, Brandon

doi:10.1029/2022ms003247

Cited by 13 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…These sub-floe scale dynamics also favor a positive correlation between floe size and thickness, which sharpens in summer within the thermodynamically-controlled southern Weddell Sea but reduces in the west due to weaker compaction. The ice thickness metrics developed in this work may thus complement the horizontal size and shape indicators traditionally used to calibrate floe-resolving models 62,63 and help improve subgrid parameterizations within continuum-based climate models 46 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The forward cascade of sea ice floes in the Weddell Sea

Gupta,

Regan,

Koo

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Sea ice is a material composed of polydisperse floes whose geometries evolve in response to conditions in the surrounding ocean and atmosphere. Due to sparse observations, quantifying the influences of basin-wide forcings on floe behavior has remained a challenge, and past studies have instead focused on finer-scale dynamics in driving the summer break up of the pack. Here, we combine high-resolution altimetry and imagery to characterize the life cycle of floes in the Weddell Sea, which we link to large-scale dynamics inferred from sea ice age estimates across the gyre. We demonstrate that basin-wide solar heating and oceanic circulation govern the floe size and thickness distributions during break up, in a forward cascade involving synoptic, mesoscale and floe-scale forcings fracturing ice into increasingly smaller pieces. This cascade is arrested by lateral erosive processes acting at the sub-floe scale, as evidenced by the three-dimensional rounding of floes during summer. We hypothesize that projected basin-scale changes over the next decades may accelerate the forward cascade of sea ice and result in smaller floes that are more vulnerable to melt.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The forward cascade of sea ice floes in the Weddell Sea

Gupta,

Regan,

Koo

et al. 2023

Preprint

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“…We examine the effects of mesoscale and submesoscale oceanic eddies on ice motion using a discrete element sea ice model (SubZero, Manucharyan and Montemuro (2022)) forced by a two-layer quasi-geostrophic (QG) ocean model. We use circular sea ice floes with radii R ice " 1, 2, .…”

Section: Simulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Observing floe-scale sea ice motion in the Greenland Sea marginal ice zone during summer

Watkins,

Buckley,

Kim

et al. 2024

Preprint

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The Fram Strait is a key region for ice export, linking the Arctic with the world ocean. We present floe-scale observations of sea ice motion in the Fram Strait marginal ice zone (MIZ) derived from moderate-scale optical imagery spanning the 2003-2020 period. Tracked ice floes provide Lagrangian measures of ice motion during the spring and summer. We show that the floe size distribution affects the rotation rates and fluctuating velocities of sea ice floes. Using simulations based on a quasi-geostrophic ocean model and a discrete element sea ice model, we show that ocean eddy forcing alone can produce the distinct non-Gaussian velocity anomaly distributions seen in observations. The scale of the velocity distributions decreases with increasing floe size and with increasing distance from the ice edge. Similarly, we show that the rotation rate distribution in both observations and simulations narrows with increasing floe size. Finally, we show that the deformation rates measured from tracked MIZ ice floes reproduce the power law scaling seen in the central Arctic, with the deformation rate decreasing as the scale of observations increases. The observations presented here provide a new avenue for sea ice model development and validation in the summer MIZ.

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“…To have the sea ice and atmosphere and ocean represented on the same coarse and fine scales, it is natural to use a particle model for floes on the fine scales. While particle models of sea ice were less well-developed two decades ago during the advent of atmospheric multiscale modeling (i.e., superparameterization), particle models of sea ice have undergone substantial development in recent years [40,41,37,1,15,71,69,54], and it is feasible to now consider a multi-scale model of sea ice and to use a particle-continuum approach.…”

Section: Motivation For Particle-continuum Super-parameterizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Particle-Continuum Multiscale Modeling of Sea Ice Floes

Deng¹,

Stechmann²,

Chen³

2023

Preprint

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Sea ice profoundly influences the polar environment and the global climate. Traditionally, Sea ice has been modeled as a continuum under Eulerian coordinates to describe its large-scale features, using, for instance, viscous-plastic rheology. Recently, Lagrangian particle models, also known as the discrete element method (DEM) models, have been utilized for characterizing the motion of individual sea ice fragments (called floes) at scales of 10 km and smaller, especially in marginal ice zones. This paper develops a multiscale model that couples the particle and the continuum systems to facilitate an effective representation of the dynamical and statistical features of sea ice across different scales. The multiscale model exploits a Boltzmann-type system that links the particle movement with the continuum equations. For the small-scale dynamics, it describes the motion of each sea ice floe. Then, as the large-scale continuum component, it treats the statistical moments of mass density and linear and angular velocities. The evolution of these statistics affects the motion of individual floes, which in turn provides bulk feedback that adjusts the large-scale dynamics. Notably, the particle model characterizing the sea ice floes is localized and fully parallelized, in a framework that is sometimes called superparameterization, which significantly improves computation efficiency. Numerical examples demonstrate the effective performance of the multiscale model. Additionally, the study demonstrates that the multiscale model has a linearorder approximation to the truth model.

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SubZero: A Sea Ice Model With an Explicit Representation of the Floe Life Cycle

Cited by 13 publications

References 73 publications

The forward cascade of sea ice floes in the Weddell Sea

The forward cascade of sea ice floes in the Weddell Sea

Observing floe-scale sea ice motion in the Greenland Sea marginal ice zone during summer

Particle-Continuum Multiscale Modeling of Sea Ice Floes

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