[MITgcm-devel] pkg/icefront

[Martin Losch]

Hi Dimitris,

can you confirm that the timings in the sea-ice paper are consistent  
(all with the same exectuable or the same compiler flags?)

Without having thought about this too much I think you should extend  
pkg/shelfice.
But: I only neglected the horizontal faces, because it was simpler and  
nobody so far cared about them: dx = 5km and larger, dz = 10m-500m ->  
area of ice front/area of ice base = 1/10 at maximum (and even this  
only hypothetically at very large depths, because normally the ice  
shelves extend to 1500m, where the vertical resolution is better than  
500m in ECCO/ECCO2 and any other configuration that I can think of),  
more like 1/100 - 1/500. Is it really worth it? The entire  
parameterization is so shaky that add another 1% of uncertainty  
doesn't really seem to matter, does it?

Martin

On Dec 10, 2009, at 12:49 AM, Dimitris Menemenlis wrote:

> Martin and Jean-Michel, for application to Greenland glaciers, I am  
> thinking of
> extending pkg/shelfice so that it can deal with vertical ice  
> fronts.  This would involve:
>
> 1) a routine (similar to dwnslp_init_fixed.F) which locates 3 things:
>   a) horizontal locations of wet grid points adjacent to glacier  
> calving faces
>   b) vertical location of points in a)
>   c) ratio of vertical face area to horizontal grid area for points  
> in a)
>
> 2) a routine similar to shelfice_thermodynamics which applies the  
> ice shelf melt/freeze
>    equations to locations detected in 1) above and which scales them  
> by 1c
>
> 3) a routine similar to shelfice_forcing which applies the forcing  
> computed
>     in 2) to locations computed in 1)
>
> The question I have is whether above computations should be  
> incorporated in
> pkg/shelfice or whether they should be carried out in a separate  
> package, e.g.,
> pkg/icefront, that reproduces most of the functionality of pkg/ 
> shelfice ?
>
> Let me know preferred way to proceed.  D.
>
> Dimitris Menemenlis <menemenlis at jpl.nasa.gov>
> Jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology
> MS 300-323, 4800 Oak Grove Dr, Pasadena CA 91109-8099, USA
> tel: 818-354-1656;  cell: 818-625-6498;  fax: 818-393-6720
>
>
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