Articles | Volume 12, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-215-2019
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-215-2019
Development and technical paper
 | 
14 Jan 2019
Development and technical paper |  | 14 Jan 2019

Implementation and performance of adaptive mesh refinement in the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM v4.14)

Thiago Dias dos Santos, Mathieu Morlighem, Hélène Seroussi, Philippe Remy Bernard Devloo, and Jefferson Cardia Simões

Model code and software

Continental scale, high order, high spatial resolution, ice sheet modeling using the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM) (https://issm.jpl.nasa.gov/download) E. Larour, H. Seroussi, M. Morlighem, and E. Rignot https://doi.org/10.1029/2011JF002140

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Short summary
The reduction of numerical errors in ice sheet modeling increases the results' accuracy reliability. We improve numerical accuracy by better capturing grounding line dynamics, while maintaining a low computational cost. We implement an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technique in the Ice Sheet System Model and compare AMR simulations with uniformly refined meshes. Our results show that the computational time with AMR is significantly shorter than for uniformly refined meshes for a given accuracy.