Highlights

This work was supported by the NASA Mission to Planet Earth and the NSF Office of Polar Programs.

Keywords Ice cover, Modelling, Geographic regions

Abstract The ice pack covering the Arctic basin is composed of a multitude of ice parcels of different areas, ages, thicknesses, and deformation histories that are frozen together into larger plates that combine and break apart in response to the demands of ever changing boundary conditions and forcing. Current Arctic sea ice models are Eulerian continuum models that use a plastic yield surface to characterize the constitutive behavior of the pack. An alternative is to adopt a discontinuous Lagrangian approach, based on a discrete element model and explicitly simulate individual ice parcels and the interactions between them. The mechanics of the Lagrangian sea ice model are outlined in detail along with the methods that will be used for validation.

Introduction

The ice pack covering the Arctic basin is composed of a multitude of ice parcels of different area, ages, thicknesses, and deformation histories that are frozen together into larger plates that combine and break apart in response to the demands of ever changing boundary conditions and forcing. Current ice-ocean models of the Arctic ice pack typically use an Eulerian continuum approach that uses a plastic yield surface...