Global existence and uniqueness for Hibler's visco-plastic sea-ice model

TL;DR

This paper establishes the global existence and uniqueness of weak solutions for Hibler's visco-plastic sea-ice model, providing rigorous mathematical validation for a widely used climate simulation model.

Contribution

It proves global well-posedness for the original Hibler's sea-ice model with degeneracy and plasticity, extending prior local-in-time results to a global setting.

Findings

Proved global existence of weak solutions.

Established uniqueness of solutions.

Handled degeneracy and plasticity in the stress tensor.

Abstract

In this paper, we prove global existence and uniqueness of weak solutions to the momentum equations of Hibler's visco-plastic model for the dynamics of the arctic sea-ice covers. Although Hibler's model is standardly used in global climate simulations, there are only few rigorous mathematical results so far that mainly concern local-in-time well-posedness of globally regularized variants. Here, we consider Hibler's original model with local cut-off for arbitrarily small and large strain rates. Degeneracy and plasticity of the stress tensor hold in this range.