Development of a total variation diminishing (TVD) sea ice transport scheme and its application in an ocean (SCHISM v5.11) and sea ice (Icepack v1.3.4) coupled model on unstructured grids

Abstract

As the demand for increased resolution and complexity in unstructured sea ice models is growing, higher demands are also placed on the sea ice transport scheme. In this study, we couple the Semi-implicit Cross-scale Hydro-science Integrated System Model (SCHISM, v5.11) with Icepack (v1.3.4), the column physics package of the Los Alamos sea ice model (CICE); a key step is to implement a total variation diminishing (TVD) transport scheme for the multi-class sea ice module in the coupled model. Compared with the second-order upwind scheme and the finite-element flux-corrected transport (FEM-FCT) scheme, the TVD transport scheme is overall superior when evaluated based on conservation, accuracy, efficiency (even with very high resolution), and strict monotonicity. Although it is slightly weaker than FEM-FCT in terms of accuracy alone, the TVD scheme still outperforms the other two schemes in comprehensive performance. The new coupled model outperforms the existing single-class ice model of SCHISM in the case of Lake Superior. For the Arctic Ocean case, it successfully reproduces the long-term changes in the sea ice extent, sea ice boundary, concentration observations from satellites, and thickness from in situ measurement.