[MITgcm-support] Treatment of Antarctic grounding zone regions

[Pochini, Enrico]

Dear community,

I have a question for the polar oceanographers:

I have noticed that in bathymetric reconstructions available for Antarctica
(e.g. Bedmap2, RTopo-2) there are regions corresponding to the grounding
zone of the biggest ice shelves where the water column thickness (resulting
from the subtraction draft - bathy) equates exactly 1m.

For my simulations I work in the Ross Sea at 5km resolution and vertical
layers of a few tens of metres at the depth of the grounding zone. I am
wondering whether this region should be cut out directly as non-resolvable
in my vertical discretization, or whether, in a less conservative approach,
the bathymetry should be deepened in order to resolve the region in at
least one layer.

Employing a preprocessing algorithm (
https://github.com/knaughten/mitgcm_python) I obtain a grounding-zone
water-thickness of ~ 50-80 m, enough to fit ~1-2 layers.

I am uncertain about which way to take, so I'm curious to hear how you
treat such thin cavities in high resolution models in other Antarctic seas,
whether you cut them or keep them, and how you make them resolvable without
affecting too much the overall setup.

Thanks!

Enrico P.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.mitgcm.org/pipermail/mitgcm-support/attachments/20201118/2b8b9201/attachment.html>