Applied Mathematics Group

Framework for Antarctic System Science in E3SM (FAnSSIE)

The Antarctic ice sheet is a major contributor to the risk of future sea level rise. Its floating ice shelves along the continental coast serve to protect larger glacial systems on land from flowing into the sea. As these ice shelves erode through the transport of warming ocean water into cavities below the ice, destabilizing transitions can occur leading to potentially runaway disintegration of the basin of ice held back by the ice shelves. Simulating this process requires high-resolution and ideally coupled ice and ocean dynamical simulations.

Brookhaven’s research, as part of the larger multi-institution FAnSSIE project led by Los Alamos National Laboratory, calibrates ice sheet models to historical observations of Antarctic and quantifies the uncertainties in projected future sea level rise. The mathematical approach involves statistical/machine learning emulation or surrogate modeling trained to perturbed-parameter ensembles of high-resolution numerical simulations of Antarctic ice dynamics in combination with probabilistic Bayesian calibration of model parameters to data and the propagation of these uncertainties to future projections.