[MITgcm-devel] r_hFld in seaice_advection

[Martin Losch]

Jean-Michel can explain that much better. I believe, he introduced that variable. When we coupled thsice and seaice, seaice_advection was used to advect not only the "extensive" variables heff/area, but also the "intensive" thsice variables enthalphy, and for those Jean-Michel needed extra terms to get the conservation of intensive variables right. Nowadays, thsice has its own advection routine and this field is not used anymore, but maybe in the future, so lets leave it.

intensive/extensive is thermodynamics language (at least that where I learned it first), here is a simple explanation by Wikipedia:
> In the physical sciences, an intensive property (also called a bulk property), is a physical property of a system that does not depend on the system size or the amount of material in the system: it is scale invariant. By contrast, an extensive property of a system does depend on the system size or the amount of material in the system. Some intensive properties, such as viscosity, are empirical macroscopic quantities and are not relevant to extremely small systems.
> For example, density is an intensive quantity (it does not depend on the quantity), while mass and volume are extensive quantities. Note that the ratio of two extensive quantities that scale in the same way is scale-invariant, and hence an intensive quantity.

Martin

On Apr 8, 2010, at 9:19 PM, Menemenlis, Dimitris (3248) wrote:

> Martin, what is "intensive" sea ice in seaice_advection?
> 
> C  r_hFld          :: reciprol of ice-thickness (only used for "intensive"
> C                     type of sea-ice field)
> 
> r_hFld  array appears to be permanently set to 1?
> 
> Thanks, D.
> 
> 
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