Characteristics of Southern Ocean Sea Ice Distribution Modeled Using Cavitating Fluid Rheology and Climatological Atmospheric Data

Cavitating fluid sea ice model of Plato and Hibler (1992) is applied to the Southern Ocean with an idealized, circular Antarctica. Using climatological atmospheric forcing fields averaged in the zonal direction, we show that oceanic heat flux and ice velocity have major effects on the seasonal change of ice edge, as other studies showed. In our model results, there appears a zone of free drift that contains a polynya zone. Thermodynamic forcing functions make dominant contributions to daily increments of ice thickness and compactness, except the zones of ice edge and polynya. The dominant contributions are also shown in distributions of the temperature on ice surface and several to terms in surface heat balance equation, and are also confirmed by those obtained from the thermodynamic-only model with the different locations of ice edge.