Modeling Antarctic Sea Ice Variability Using a Brittle Rheology

Abstract

Sea ice is a composite solid material that sustains large fracture features at scales from meters to kilometres. These fractures can play an important role in coupled atmosphere-ocean processes. To model these features, brittle sea ice physics, via the Brittle-Bingham-Maxwell (BBM) rheology, has been implemented in the Lagrangian neXt generation Sea Ice Model (neXtSIM). In Arctic-only simulations, the BBM rheology has shown a capacity to represent observationally consistent sea ice fracture patterns and breakup across a wide range of time and length scales. Still, it has not been tested whether this approach is suitable for the modeling of Antarctic sea ice, which is thinner and more seasonal compared to Arctic sea ice, and whether the ability to reproduce sea ice fractures has an impact on simulating Antarctic sea ice properties. Here, we introduce a new 50-km grid-spacing Antarctic configuration of neXtSIM, neXtSIM-Ant, using the BBM rheology. We evaluate this simulation against observations of sea ice extent, drift, and thickness and compare it with identically-forced neXtSIM simulations that use the standard modified Elastic-Visco-Plastic (mEVP) rheology. In general, using BBM results in thicker sea ice and an improved correlation of sea ice drift with observations than mEVP. We suggest that this is related to short-duration breakup events caused by Antarctic storms that are not well-simulated in the viscous-plastic model.