Latest revision as of 10:31, 23 October 2024

Abstract

The Antarctic sea ice, which undergoes annual freezing and melting, plays a signif icant role in the global climate cycle. Adverse environmental conditions in the Southern Ocean influence the extent and amount of ice in the Marginal Ice Zones (MIZ), the BioGeo- Chemical (BGC) cycles, and their interconnected relationships. The ’Pancake’ floes are a composition of porous sea ice matrix with interstitial brine, nutrients, and biological com- munities inside the pores. To realistically model these multi-phasic and multi-component coupled processes, the extended Theory of Porous Media (eTPM) is used to develop mod- els capable of simulating the different seasonal variations. All critical variables like salinity, ice volume fraction, and tem perature, among others, are considered and have their equations of state. The phase transition phenomenon is approached through a micro-macro linking scheme. A Phase- field solidification model coupled with salinity is used to model the micro-scale freezing processes and up-scaled to the macro scale eTPM model. This allows for modeling the salt trapped inside the pores. For the biological part, a BGC flux model for sea ice is also set up to simulate the algal species present in the sea ice matrix. Processes like photosynthesis are dependent on temperature and salinity, and are derived through an ODE-PDE coupling with the eTPM model. Academic sim ulations and results are presented as validation for the mathematical model. These high-fidelity models will eventually lead to their incorporation into large-scale global climate models.

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