Modelling sea ice and melt ponds evolution: sensitivity to microscale heat transfer mechanisms

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical model to simulate sea ice and melt pond evolution, analyzing how microscale heat transfer mechanisms influence melting rates and pond morphology during summer.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled PDE model for ice and pond evolution and investigates the sensitivity of melt dynamics to microscale heat transfer parameters.

Findings

Different heat flux scalings affect surface ablation rates.

System robustness in pond surface area distributions.

Initial topography influences pond morphology.

Abstract

We present a mathematical model describing the evolution of sea ice and meltwater during summer. The system is described by two coupled partial differential equations for the ice thickness $h$ and pond depth $w$ fields. We test the sensitivity of the model to variations of parameters controlling fluid-dynamic processes at the pond level, namely the variation of turbulent heat flux with pond depth and the lateral melting of ice enclosing a pond. We observe that different heat flux scalings determine different rates of total surface ablations, while the system is relatively robust in terms of probability distributions of pond surface areas. Finally, we study pond morphology in terms of fractal dimensions, showing that the role of lateral melting is minor, whereas there is evidence of an impact from the initial sea ice topography.