A new fully nonisothermal coupled model for the simulation of ice sheet flow

A shallow ice thermocoupled model for the complex nonlinear polythermal ice sheet dynamics is proposed and solved by means of efficient numerical methods. A novelty is the obstacle problem formulation associated to a nonlinear integro-differential equation (with nonlocal temperature dependent coefficients) for the ice sheet profile. This formulation is motivated by the free boundary feature and the influence of the temperature on the profile (fully nonisothermal model). Concerning the temperature equation, a dynamically prescribed surface temperature, obtained from an Energy Balance model corrected by the altitude effect, is posed. As the profile and temperature equations are fully coupled, a nonlinear PDE system governing the upper ice sheet profile, the velocity field, the temperature and the basal stress is stated. In addition to the numerical difficulties associated to the new profile equation, several techniques have been considered for the numerical solution of the temperature, velocity and basal magnitudes. Discussions concerning the nonlinear dynamics of the different involved magnitudes and the improvement in their computed values with respect to previous works are also presented.