Abstract
Abstract. In the last decade, the number of ice-sheet models has increased substantially, in line with the growth of the glaciological community. These models use solvers based on different approximations of ice dynamics. In particular, several depth-integrated dynamics solvers have emerged as fast solvers capable of resolving the relevant physics of ice sheets at the continental scale. However, the numerical stability of these schemes has not been studied systematically to evaluate their effectiveness in practice. Here we focus on three such solvers, the so-called Hybrid, L1L2-SIA and DIVA solvers, as well as the well-known SIA and SSA solvers as boundary cases. We investigate the numerical stability of these solvers as a function of grid resolution and the state of the ice sheet for an explicit time discretization scheme of the mass conservation step. Under simplified conditions with constant viscosity, the maximum stable time step of the Hybrid solver, like the SIA solver, has a quadratic dependence on grid resolution. In contrast, the DIVA solver has a maximum time step that is independent of resolution as the grid becomes increasingly refined, like the SSA solver. A simple 1D implementation of the L1L2-SIA solver indicates that it should behave similarly, but in practice, the complexity of its implementation appears to restrict its stability. In realistic simulations of the Greenland Ice Sheet with a nonlinear rheology, the DIVA and SSA solvers maintain superior numerical stability, while the SIA, Hybrid and L1L2-SIA solvers show markedly poorer performance. At a grid resolution of Δx=4 km, the DIVA solver runs approximately 20 times faster than the Hybrid and L1L2-SIA solvers as a result of a larger stable time step. Our analysis shows that as resolution increases, the ice-dynamics solver can act as a bottleneck to model performance. The DIVA solver emerges as a clear outlier in terms of both model performance and its representation of the ice-flow physics itself.
Highlights
Modeling ice sheets at the continental scale requires compromise
We focused on three fast, depth-integrated solvers that permit continental-scale simulations of ice sheets, namely the Hybrid, L1L2-shallow-ice approximation (SIA) and depth-integrated-viscosity approximation (DIVA) solvers
We derived expressions for maximum stable time steps for the DIVA, Hybrid and L1L2-SIA solvers in an idealized 1D configuration
Summary
Modeling ice sheets at the continental scale requires compromise. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets span hundreds to thousands of kilometers horizontally and interact with the rest of the Earth system on timescales of up to thousands of years. Solving the full Stokes stress balance at high resolution to calculate the ice dynamics over such a large domain for a long timescale is still computationally challenging. It is important to reduce the complexity of simulations of ice dynamics. Several factors reduce the need to simulate the whole system using the full Stokes equations. Ice sheets typically have low aspect ratios, growing only a few kilometers thick near the domes but extending thousands of kilometers horizontally (i.e., ice sheets are shallow). This condition implies that over most length scales of interest, several terms in the stress balance can be ignored. Some boundary conditions, the basal friction at the bed, are poorly known, which means that the added accuracy in simulating velocities with a full Stokes approach may not translate
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