[MITgcm-support] Increasing sea-ice/atmosphere drag

[Naughten, Kaitlin A.]

Hi everyone,


I am running MITgcm on a Weddell Sea domain with sea ice and ice shelf cavities. I have a fresh bias in the cavity, which is likely because the katabatic winds in my atmospheric forcing are too weak and sea ice formation is therefore not strong enough. I am trying to counteract this by increasing the SEAICE_drag (between the atmosphere and the sea ice).


Currently I have this set to 0.002 which is double the default value. If I push it any further, the model blows up due to extreme potential temperatures. This blowup seems to be happening just inside the cavity, just beside a region of very thick ice (~40 m) which forms due to supercooled water flowing out of the ice shelf cavity. I know this thick ice is due to the supercooled water, because if I switch off ice shelf thermodynamics it goes away. It doesn't seem to cause any problems for the rest of the simulation, except that now it seems to be stopping me from increasing sea ice drag. At the time of the blowup, the sea ice velocities in this region are also very strong (~3 m/s).


I am using modified EVP and have tried increasing the number of EVP subcycles, as well as the alpha and beta parameters, but this does not help. I have two questions:


  1.  Is there any other way I can improve the stability of the sea ice so that I can continue to increase drag without making it blow up? I have tried LSR instead of modified EVP but it makes the thick ice worse.
  2.  Does anyone have suggestions for how to get rid of the thick ice? I have tried removing in-situ supercooling outside of cavities, but this significantly impacted the water mass properties on the shelf. I also tried setting SEAICEpressReplFac to 0 which made no real difference, and using very high sea ice diffusivities which just spread the thick ice out a tiny bit.


Many thanks,

Kaitlin


Dr Kaitlin Naughten
British Antarctic Survey


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