Articles | Volume 18, issue 8
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-3453-2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-3453-2024
Research article
 | 
07 Aug 2024
Research article |  | 07 Aug 2024

Increasing numerical stability of mountain valley glacier simulations: implementation and testing of free-surface stabilization in Elmer/Ice

André Löfgren, Thomas Zwinger, Peter Råback, Christian Helanow, and Josefin Ahlkrona

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Cited articles

Andrés-Martínez, M., Morgan, J. P., Pérez-Gussinyé, M., and Rüpke, L.: A new free-surface stabilization algorithm for geodynamical modelling: Theory and numerical tests, Phys. Earth Planet. In., 246, 41–51, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pepi.2015.07.003, 2015. a
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Blatter, H., Greve, R., and Abe-Ouchi, A.: A short history of the thermomechanical theory and modelling of glaciers and ice sheets, J. Glaciol., 56, 1087–1094, https://doi.org/10.3189/002214311796406059, 2010. a
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Short summary
This paper investigates a stabilization method for free-surface flows in the context of glacier simulations. Previous applications of the stabilization on ice flows have only considered simple ice-sheet benchmark problems; in particular the method had not been tested on real-world glacier domains. This work addresses this shortcoming by demonstrating that the stabilization works well also in this case and increases stability and robustness without negatively impacting computation times.
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