Estimation of Calving Law Parameters from Satellite Data

Abstract

Capturing the calving front motion is critical for simulations of ice shelves and tidewater glaciers. Multiple physical processes, including sliding, water pressure and failure need to be understood to accurately model the front. Calving is particularly challenging due to its discontinuous nature and modellers require more tools to examine it. A common technique for capturing the front in ice simulations is the Level-set method. The front is represented implicitly by the zero isoline of a function. The movement of the front is described by a Hamilton-Jacobi PDE where the velocity of the front includes two components: the horizontal velocity of the ice sheet and the ablation rate, i.e., the sum of melting and calving rates. We are developing scalable simulation code to solve the Level-set problem and to estimate parameters of calving laws from satellite images using numerical optimization. The method is adaptable to different types of calving laws as well as other interface capturing problems and handles temporal sparsity of observations and coupling with an ice sheet model. The code is sufficiently scalable for large scale, high resolution models of continental ice sheets.