GAFD Seminar: Clara Henry (British Antarctic Survey)
Wednesday, 20 May 2026 at 13:30
Numerical Stabilisation Schemes for Ice-Sheet Modelling
Event details
Title: Numerical Stabilisation Schemes for Ice-Sheet Modelling
Abstract: Ice-sheet modelling continues to be challenging because of the need to balance computational efficiency with model complexity, a trade-off that affects the accuracy of sea-level projections. A major reason for the computational efficiency bottleneck is that the system of PDEs describing ice flow is stiff, meaning that the time-step size is restricted by fast-decaying modes. Generally, restrictive time stepping can be alleviated by solving the system of PDEs implicitly rather than explicitly. However, without modification, the implicit treatment of both the momentum equations and the mass conservation equation is challenging.
To address these time-step restrictions, we develop numerical stabilisation schemes for ice-sheet models of varying complexity by modifying the gravitational forcing term in the momentum equations. Our methods enable significantly larger stable time steps, including when using a fully implicit time-stepping scheme. They can easily be implemented in existing codes and have the potential to significantly improve the computational efficiency of large-scale simulations of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.
Organiser
Mathematics and Statistics