Overview
Ice-shelf coupling: The ice-shelf coupling will be used for Antarctica (left side of figure). Greenland has some small ice shelves, but they are too small to be resolved sufficiently in MPAS-Ocean, so we do not intend to use the ice-shelf coupling for Greenland cases.
Thermal-forcing coupling: The thermal-forcing coupling was primarily intended for Greenland where there are primarily vertical cliffs and little floating ice (right side of figure). In that geometry, MPAS-Ocean is not equipped to calculate melt rates, and even if it could, most of the narrow fjords around Greenland would be unresolved so the ocean domain rarely intercepts the Greenland marine termini. Instead, we make use of marine melting parameterizations that are a function of the thermal forcing (ocean temperature minus in situ freezing temperature). We also make use of a capability we added to MALI to horizontally extrapolate ocean thermal forcing from wherever on the MALI mesh it’s available to the current terminus positions. While the thermal-forcing coupling is primarily developed for Greenland, Antarctica also has vertical marine cliffs without ice shelves in some places (and will likely have more in the future), so we do anticipate eventually using the TF coupling in Antarctica at the same time as the ice-shelf coupling.
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There are many ways to couple with the ice sheet model, MALI. Called “glc” in the coupler.
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