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The E3SM Sea Ice Model (MPAS-seaice)

MPAS-seaice is an unstructured-mesh sea-ice model that uses the Modeling for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) framework, allowing enhanced horizontal resolution in regions of interest. MPAS-seaice incorporates many of the methods used in the Los Alamos CICE sea-ice model, but adapted to the Spherical Centroidal Vornoi Tesselation (SCVT) meshes used by the MPAS framework.

  • The MPAS-seaice User's Guide outlines the MPAS Framework, on which MPAS-seaice is built, and Icepack, the column physics submodule in MPAS-seaice, and it provides guidance for controlling MPAS-seaice within E3SM.
  • The MPAS-seaice Technical Guide describes the mesh and major physics components underlying MPAS-seaice code and its coupling to E3SM.
  • The MPAS-seaice Developer's Guide provides additional information relevant for model development, including the Icepack interface and development/testing scripts.

Icepack

MPAS-seaice incorporates the Icepack software package for sea ice column physics, developed by the CICE Consortium, as a submodule. Icepack documentation. provides a complete description of the column physics and instructions for using Icepack as a standalone model. The source code for this documentation is maintained in E3SM's Icepack fork (navigate to the desired branch, then to doc/source/, etc). This is the documentation associated with the latest Icepack version that has been merged into E3SM, plus any documentation changes made within E3SM itself. This documentation is fully rendered in E3SM's Icepack readthedocs.

Guidance for developing Icepack documentation includes instructions for building the readthedocs documentation yourself.

MPAS-seaice code structure

Some MPAS-seaice functionality is sourced from the MPAS Framework: E3SM/components/mpas-framework. In particular, see E3SM/components/mpas-framework/core_seaice.

Code structure within the mpas-seaice/component-level directory:

Directories Function
bld namelist configuration files
cime_config build and configuration scripts
docs this documentation
driver coupling modules
src source code for the model physics and output
src/analysis_members source code for model output
src/column source code for the (original) column_package
src/icepack link to the icepack submodule
src/model_forward top-level mpas-seaice modules
src/shared dynamics and general-purpose modules (e.g. mesh, constants)
testing testing scripts