[MITgcm-devel] another bug in growth.F ?

[Dimitris Menemenlis]

Jinlun and Marting, I am confused by logic of the HSNOW modification in
http://mitgcm.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/MITgcm/pkg/seaice/growth.F

Are you trying to convert snow to sea ice when the surface level temperature is 
greater than the freezing point?  There's a couple of things I don't understand:

1) The units of YNEG are deg K, but code appears to assume that they are m of 
sea ice.

2) You are assuming that you melt the snow with excess yneg and then refreeze it 
as sea ice, right?  So energetically this process should have zero net latent 
heat production or consumption, no?  Instead, code seems to assume that the 
melting process consumes latent heat but that the refreezing of the snow into 
sea ice happens without addition of latent heat?

3) The net impact of freshwater forcing to ocean of melting and then refreezing 
of snow should be zero, no?  Instead code subtracts the resulting sea-ice growth 
from SEAICE_SALT?

4) Finally, YNEG, which supposedly is now m of ice is added back to QNET as if 
it were deg K.

Please help.  Dimitris