Abstract
Abstract. The Finite-Element Sea Ice Model (FESIM), used as a component of the Finite-Element Sea ice Ocean Model, is presented. Version 2 includes the elastic-viscous-plastic (EVP) and viscous-plastic (VP) solvers and employs a flux corrected transport algorithm to advect the ice and snow mean thicknesses and concentration. The EVP part also includes a modified approach proposed recently by Bouillon et al. (2013), which is characterized by an improved stability compared to the standard EVP approach. The model is formulated on unstructured triangular meshes. It assumes a collocated placement of ice velocities, mean thicknesses and concentration at mesh vertices, and relies on piecewise-linear (P1) continuous elements. Simple tests for the modified EVP and VP solvers are presented to show that they may produce very close results provided the number of iterations is sufficiently high.
Highlights
The Finite-Element Sea Ice Model (FESIM) was developed as a component of the Finite-Element Sea Ice Ocean circulation Model (FESOM) in 2003
The P1 − P1 continuous representation used in the dynamical core led to a very compact code relying on the numerical infrastructure of FESOM
The intention of this paper is to present the description of the dynamical part of the model, and illustrate the performance of the solver algorithms implemented in the model
Summary
The Finite-Element Sea Ice Model (FESIM) was developed as a component of the Finite-Element Sea Ice Ocean circulation Model (FESOM) (for a recent description see Wang et al, 2014) in 2003. Its basis was the standard zero-layer thermodynamical component, and an elastic-viscous-plastic (EVP) solver coded following Hunke and Dukowicz (1997) and the early version of CICE documentation (see Hunke and Lipscomb, 2008 for the current one) It was the first unstructured-mesh sea ice model used for global ocean– sea ice simulations. The model reached a high level of maturity and shows a robust behavior in numerous simulations performed with FESOM (see, e.g., Sidorenko et al, 2011; Wang et al, 2012; Wekerle et al, 2013; Timmermann and Hellmer, 2013; Wang et al, 2014; Sidorenko et al, 2015) It may serve as a prototype for other groups developing unstructured-mesh models intended for large-scale ocean sea ice simulations.
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