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Tutorials: SHMIP test cases

The Subglacial Hydrology Model Intercomparison Project1, or SHMIP, is built around six synthetic Suites of experiments (labelled from A to F), each consisting of a set of four to six numerical experiments, designed to show the formation and evolution of the different subglacial drainage elements (sheets and channels) in the context of different input scenarios. Two geometries are considered, a land-terminating ice sheet margin and a synthetic valley-glacier geometry, as shown in Fig a) and b), respectively.

This section will walk you trough setting up and running SUHMO’s version of the SHMIP suite of test cases A and B.

Reminder: setting up your dependencies and environment

Make sure to visit the Quick start page ! You will find all information relative to setting up your environment, including downloading all dependencies.

Suite A

Suite A is a distributed-flow test case, with a steady and spatially uniform water input. The input increases by four orders of magnitude from a low value corresponding to basal melt production (Run A1, m ≃ 2.5 mm a$^{-1}$) to a high water input.

The topography considered is the synthetic representation of a land-terminating ice sheet margin (see a) in the previous image). The ice-sheet domain measures 100 km in the $x$ direction and 20 km in the $y$ direction, the bed is flat and a parabolic ice surface $z_s$ is prescribed by:

\[z_s(x,y) = 6 (\sqrt{x + 5000} - \sqrt{5000} ) + 1\]

All you have to do to run the 6 numerical experiments of Suite A is go into the exec folder A_SHMIP and build the executable:

cd $SUHMO_HOME/exec/A_SHMIP
make all

Then you can go into any of the subfolders AX, where X=1…6 and launch the computation(s):

cd AX
../Suhmo2d.**.ex  input.hydro

All simulations are single level, and use a $dt$ of 1 hour, and a $\Delta_x$ of 312.5 m. Results for each numerical experiment, following the format of the SHMIP Supplementary material2, is provided in the following sections.

A1

A2

A3

A4

A5

A6

Suite B

Comming soon …

B1

B2

B3

B4

B5

B6

  1. de Fleurian, B., Werder, M. A., Beyer, S., Brinkerhoff, D. J., Delaney, I., Dow, C. F., Downs, J., Gagliardini, O., Hoffman, M. J., Hooke, R. L., et al.: SHMIP The subglacial hydrology model intercomparison Project, Journal of Glaciology, 64, 897–916, doi, 2018. ↩

  2. de Fleurian, B., Werder, M. A., Beyer, S., Brinkerhoff, D. J., Delaney, I., Dow, C. F., Downs, J., Gagliardini, O., Hoffman, M. J., Hooke, R. L., et al.:Supplementary Material, doi ↩