Numerical simulations of sea ice with different advection schemes

• Published in: Journal of hydrodynamics. Series B Vol. 23; no. 3; pp. 372 - 378
• Main Author: LIU, Xi-ying
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Singapore Elsevier Ltd 01.06.2011; Springer Singapore; State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics,Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China; Institute of Meteorology, PLA University of Science and Technology, N anjing 211101, China
• Subjects: Advection; advection scheme; Barents Sea; Computer simulation; Engineering; Engineering Fluid Dynamics; Hydrology/Water Resources; Latitude; Marine; Mathematical models; Modular; Numerical and Computational Physics; Ocean models; Sea ice; Simulation; PNE, Barents Sea; ANE, Greenland Sea; PN, Arctic Basin; advection scheme; simulation; sea ice
• ISSN: 1001-6058; 1878-0342
• DOI: 10.1016/S1001-6058(10)60125-4

Numerical simulations are carried out for sea ice with four different advection schemes to study their effects on the simulation results. The sea ice model employed here is the Sea Ice Simulator (SIS) of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Modular Ocean Model version 4b (MOM4b) and the four advection schemes are, the upwind scheme originally used in the SIS, the Multi-Dimensional Positive Advection (MDPA) scheme, the Incremental Remapping Scheme (IRS) and the Two Step Shape Preserving (TSSP) scheme. The latter three schemes are newly introduced. To consider the interactions between sea ice and ocean, a mixed layer ocean model is introduced and coupled to the SIS. The coupled model uses a tri-polar coordinate with 120×65 grids, covering the whole earth globe, in the horizontal plane. Simulation results in the northern high latitudes are analyzed. In all simulations, the model reproduces the seasonal variation of sea ice in the northern high latitudes well. Compared with the results from the observation, the sea ice model produces some extra sea ice coverage in the Greenland Sea and Barents Sea in winter due to the exclusion of ocean current effects and the smaller simulated sea ice thickness in the Arctic basin. There are similar features among the results obtained with the introduced three advection schemes. The simulated sea ice thickness with the three newly introduced schemes are all smaller than that of the upwind scheme and the simulated sea ice velocities of movement are all smaller than that of the upwind scheme. There are more similarities shared in the results obtained with the MPDA and TSSP schemes.