MONARCHS is a NASA-funded project, led by former Ice & Climate postdoc, Dr. Samantha Buzzard, and including collaboration with with Professors Yi Deng and Jingfeng Wang at Georgia Tech. We seek to understand how the complex interactions of melt water with ice shelves may (or may not) destabilize them under future climate change. The primary project goal is to build a numerical model which simulates surface melting on ice sheets, and the vertical and horizontal melt water flow over and interaction with the ice sheet surface. This model is an open-source, python-native, standalone model, which is built with extensive community input and a plan to be coupled with state-of-the-art ice sheet and climate models. It will include many new processes and schema including a maximum entropy production (MEP) scheme for calculating surface melt, re-freezing of water within snow, formation of melt lakes, erosion of ice by water flow, and flexure of ice under loading by water.
Collaborators: Prof. Samantha Buzzard (Cardiff University), Prof. Yi Deng (GT EAS), Prof. Jingfeng Wang (GT CEE)
Current and past researchers: Danielle Grau (EAS PhD Student)