The Development of the Coupled Southern Ocean-Sea Ice-Ice Shelf Model (SOSIM v1.0)

Modeling of the interactions between the Southern Ocean, sea ice, and ice shelves can provide insights into understanding the future sea level rising and climate changes, yet the interactions in the Southern Ocean are complex due to the coupled ocean-sea ice-ice shelf system. Considering the complexity of the Southern Ocean, the development of a high-resolution coupled circumpolar ocean-sea ice-ice shelf model could provide insights into the complex processes in the Southern Ocean. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology General Circulation Model (MITgcm), including a sea ice component and an ice shelf component, has been applied to the Southern Ocean to derive estimates of the oceanic state, sea ice evolution, and ice shelf basal fluxes. This Coupled Southern Ocean-Sea Ice-Ice Shelf Model (SOSIM v1.0) uses version c66m of the MITgcm, and the ocean, sea ice, and ice shelf components share the same horizontal grid layout (the Arakawa C grid). The sea ice model in the MITgcm is a viscous-plastic dynamic and zero-layer thermodynamic model, with the so-called zero-layer thermodynamics assuming one layer of ice underneath one layer of snow. The ice-shelf model is used to represent the static and thermodynamically active ice shelves located in the south of the model domain. In this study, the configuration of SOSIM v1.0 is documented, and the simulated features from SOSIM v1.0 are evaluated.