Global well-posedness of the elastic-viscous-plastic sea-ice model with the inviscid Voigt-regularisation

TL;DR

This paper proves the global well-posedness of a regularized elastic-viscous-plastic sea-ice model using inviscid Voigt-regularisation, enabling better mathematical understanding and handling of viscosity coefficients without cutoff.

Contribution

It provides the first rigorous proof of global well-posedness for the EVP sea-ice model with Voigt regularisation, addressing previous computational and analytical challenges.

Findings

Established global well-posedness of the regularized EVP model.

Handled viscosity coefficients without cutoff due to regularisation.

Linked the EVP model's structure to viscoelastic fluid models like Oldroyd-B.

Abstract

In this paper, we initiate the rigorous mathematical analysis of the elastic-viscous-plastic (EVP) sea-ice model, which was introduced in [E. C. Hunke and J. K. Dukowicz, J. Phys. Oceanogr., 27, 9 (1997), 1849-1867]. The EVP model is one of the standard and most commonly used dynamical sea-ice models. We study a regularized version of this model. In particular, we prove the global well-posedness of the EVP model with the inviscid Voigt-regularisation of the evolution equation for the stress tensor. Due to the elastic relaxation and the Voigt regularisation, we are able to handle the case of viscosity coefficients without cutoff, which has been a major issue and a setback in the computational study and analysis of the related Hibler sea-ice model, which was originally introduced in [W. D. Hibler, J. Phys. Oceanogr., 9, 4 (1979), 815-846]. The EVP model shares some structural characteristics with the Oldroyd-B model and related models for viscoelastic non-Newtonian complex fluids.