Inversion for basal friction coefficients with a two-dimensional flow line model using Tikhonov regularization

Abstract

We present results of basal friction coefficient inversion. The inversion was performed by a 2D flow line model for one of the four fast flowing ice streams on the southern side of the Academy of Sciences Ice Cap in the Komsomolets Island, Severnaya Zemlya archipelago. The input data for the performance of both the forward and the inverse problems included synthetic aperture radar interferometry ice surface velocities, ice surface elevations and ice thicknesses obtained by airborne measurements (all were taken from Dowdeswell <em>et al.</em>, 2002). Numerical experiments with: i) different sea level shifts; and ii) randomly perturbed friction coefficient have been carried out in the forward problem. The impact of sea level changes on vertical distribution of horizontal velocity and on shear stress distribution near the ice front has been investigated in experiments with different sea level shifts. The experiments with randomly perturbed friction coefficient have revealed that the modeled surface velocity is weakly sensitive to the perturbations and, therefore, the inverse problem should be considered ill posed. To mitigate ill posedness of the inverse problem, Tikhonov’s regularization was applied. The regularization parameter was determined from the relation of the discrepancy between observed and modeled velocities to the regularization parameter. The inversion was performed for both linear and non-linear sliding laws. The inverted spatial distributions of the basal friction coefficient are similar for both sliding laws. The similarity between these inverted distributions suggests that the changes in the friction coefficient are accompanied by appropriate water content variations at the glacier base.