Impact of non-normal flow rule on linear kinematic features in pan-Arctic ice-ocean simulations

Abstract

The standard sea ice viscous-plastic (VP) rheology is based on an elliptical yield curve and a normal flow rule. This formulation implies that the post-failure deformations are always normal to the yield curve. A drawback of this is that modifications to the yield curve also lead to notable changes to the deformations. We implemented the plastic potential approach of in the CICE sea ice model. With this formulation, deformations are normal to an elliptical plastic potential which is defined independently from the yield curve. This an interesting capability as it allows to independently optimize deformations while parameters defining the yield curve could serve to adjust landfast ice and to a lesser extent sea ice drift. We investigated the impact of a non-normal flow rule in pan-Arctic simulations. Compared to the standard VP rheology, the non-normal flow rule leads to a more active sea ice cover with narrower linear kinematic features (LKFs) and a higher LKF density. The higher divergence with the non-normal flow rule causes an enhanced ice growth and larger Arctic sea ice volume. In idealized experiments, showed that the non-normal flow rule can correct the unrealistic (too large) intersection angles between LKFs. However, in our pan-Arctic simulations, the non-normal flow rule does not correct the unrealistic intersection angles which are often around 90°. Results suggest that these frequent 90° angles are partly caused by the alignment of LKFs with the computational grid.