Increasing stable time-step sizes of the free-surface problem arising in ice-sheet simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modified free-surface stabilization algorithm that significantly increases stable time-step sizes in ice-sheet models, improving computational efficiency without sacrificing accuracy.

Contribution

It adapts the free-surface stabilization algorithm from mantle convection to ice-sheet modeling, enabling larger stable time steps in nonlinear, thin domain simulations.

Findings

Stable time-step sizes increased by at least an order of magnitude.

The adapted FSSA is accurate, efficient, and easy to implement.

Instabilities behave differently on thin ice-sheet domains compared to previous applications.

Abstract

Numerical models for predicting future ice-mass loss of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet requires accurately representing their dynamics. Unfortunately, ice-sheet models suffer from a very strict time-step size constraint, which for higher-order models constitutes a severe bottleneck since in each time step a nonlinear and computationally demanding system of equations has to be solved. In this study, stable time-step sizes are increased for a full-Stokes model by implementing a so-called free-surface stabilization algorithm (FSSA). Previously this stabilization has been used successfully in mantle-convection simulations where a similar, but linear, viscous-flow problem is solved. By numerical investigation it is demonstrated that instabilities on the very thin domains required for ice-sheet modeling behave differently than on the equal-aspect-ratio domains the stabilization has previously been used on. Despite this, and despite the nonlinearity of the problem, it is shown that it is possible to adapt FSSA to work on idealized ice-sheet domains and increase stable time-step sizes by at least one order of magnitude. The FSSA presented is deemed accurate, efficient and straightforward to implement into existing ice-sheet solvers.