Sea ice model outputs developed in "Modelling Antarctic sea ice variability using a brittle rheology"

<p>Output files from the BBM, mEVP and mEVP+ runs developed in the paper entlited "Modelling Antarctic sea ice variability using a brittle rheology".&nbsp;</p> <p>Paper abstract:</p> <p>Sea ice is a composite solid material that sustains large fracture features at scales from metres to kilometres which can play an important role in coupled atmosphere-ocean processes. To model these features, brittle sea ice physics, via the Brittle-Bingham-Maxwell (BBM) rheology, has been implemented in the Lagrangian neXt generation Sea Ice Model (neXtSIM). In Arctic-only simulations the BBM rheology has shown a capacity to represent observationally consistent sea ice fracture patterns and breakup across a wide range of time and length scales. Still, it has not been tested whether this approach is suitable for the modelling of Antarctic sea ice. Here, we introduce a new 50-km grid-spacing Antarctic configuration of neXtSIM, neXtSIM-Ant, using the BBM rheology. We evaluate this simulation against observations of sea ice extent, drift, and thickness and compare it with identically-forced neXtSIM simulations that use the standard modified Elastic-Visco-Plastic (mEVP) rheology. In general, using BBM results in thicker sea ice and an improved representation of sea ice drift than mEVP. We suggest that this is related to short-duration breakup events caused by Antarctic storms that are not captured in the viscous-plastic model.&nbsp;</p>