The Big Thaw: Simulating Greenland's Future

John Burkardt
Department of Scientific Computing
Florida State University

There's a huge amount of ice covering Greenland.  That's a fact.
The average temperature of the earth seems to be rising, although
there are disputes about the amount and persistence and significance
of this rise.  However, it's certain that if the Greenland ice
melts, the ocean will rise by more than 20 feet.

It's important, when dealing with such a sensational but uncertain
event, to be able to take any of the various claims about the
future temperature of the earth, and to accurately simulate the
corresponding effects on Greenland.

The global weather models that have been in use have had a limited
ability to deal with masses of land ice such as in Greenland.  The
programs used to simulate Greenland use a grid of 5 km by 5 km,
work on a uniform rectangular grid, employ certain finite difference
or finite volume approximations, and are limited in how they can
take advantage of parallelism.

The goals of the current research (of which I am a very small part)
include moving to a finer grid (1 km by 1 km), employing a mesh
that can be adaptively refined for areas of known "rapid" ice flow,
using more sophisticated mathematical models, discretizing these
models with a finite element formulation whose approximating power
can be increased as desired, and taking advantage of powerful
nonlinear solvers that can automatically and efficiently
parallelize the solution process.