Some numerical methods for ice sheet behaviour and its visualization

Abstract

The thermomechanical ice sheet modeling is used to simulate the behavior of ice sheets in the Antarctic region. This research investigates some parameters such as ice thickness, ice temperature and ice velocity. The numerical discretization to obtain a large sparse system of unconditionally stable is based on explicit and Crank Nicolson implicit methods. The numerical solver for solving the large sparse systems is Jacobi and Gauss Seidel methods. Matlab version 2011a has been chosen as the platform to support the numerical computations. The numerical results prove that the thermomechanical ice sheet modelling is well suited to simulate the ice sheet behavior in terms of thickness, temperature and velocity. The contribution of this paper is to successfully discretize the ice thickness model based on Finite Difference Method. The ice sheet model is considered a good prediction model based on its visualization using Comsol Multiphysics software.