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

Related authors

A Fully Implicit Second Order Method for Viscous Free Surface Stokes Flow – Application to Glacier Simulations
Josefin Ahlkrona, A. Clara J. Henry, and André Löfgren
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4359,https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4359, 2025
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Geoscientific Model Development (GMD).
Short summary

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
Babuška, I.: Error-bounds for finite element method, Numer. Math., 16, 322–333, https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02165003, 1971. a
Baiocchi, C., Brezzi, F., and Franca, L. P.: Virtual bubbles and Galerkin-least-squares type methods (Ga.L.S), Comput. Method. Appl. M., 105, 125–141, https://doi.org/10.1016/0045-7825(93)90119-I, 1993. a
Blatter, H.: Velocity and stress fields in grounded glaciers: a simple algorithm for including deviatoric stress gradients, J. Glaciol., 41, 333–344, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002214300001621X, 1995. a
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
Download
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.
Share