[MITgcm-support] Ice not Moving when Resolution is Very High

[Senja Walberg]

Hello,

I'm currently experimenting with using the SEAICE package to simulate lake
ice. The domain I consider is hence very small compared to the global ocean
and the size of my grid cells is able to be set even smaller than would
conventionally be used with sea ice models.

A scaling test that I've conducted is to make a simple wind-forcing
experiment, where a constant 6 m/s wind is applied to a 1m, area=1 floe,
the dimensions of which scale with the resolution (all I'm doing is taking
the same run and changing delx, dely).

What I've found is that when delx=1km, the ice moves easily and movement
can be seen on a timescale of several minutes, and that this is also seen
when delx=500m, but when I set delx yet smaller to be 100m and 20m no
movement was seen at all in a reasonable span of time. I have some
intuitive notion that smaller floes should accelerate more slowly, which
may be wrong itself, but at some point even if the motion induced by the
wind is small, the currents of the water should cause the ice to move.
Instead, the initialized ice floes resemble static islands.

Is there something in the ice model that prevents it from scaling this low,
or is there some parameter or flag that needs adjustment in my set-up?

Attached are my data.seaice and SEAICE_OPTIONS.h

Cheers,
Senja
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