Modeling ocean heat transport to the grounding lines of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica

In the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE) located in West Antarctica, the Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers are all experiencing rapid mass loss and rounding line retreat because of enhanced ocean thermal forcing from Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) intruding into the ice shelf cavities. Here, we use 1 year of 6-hourly average outputs (September 1, 2006 to August 31, 2007) from the Southern Ocean high-resolution (SOhi) simulation and Lagrangian particles to backtrack the transport and cooling of warm water to the grounding lines of these glaciers. SOhi is a 1/24 degrees model with 225 vertical levels and includes sea ice, oceanic tides, and all ice shelves. In the ASE, SOhi model has a horizontal resolution of approximately 1.2km and a vertical resolution of 1.4 meters at the surface, 25.8 meters at 1,000 m, and 50 meters at 3000 m. The version of SOhi used in this analysis uses bathymetry is from the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans 2020 and ice cavity geometry is from BedMachine v1.39. The Lagrangian particles are advected using OceanParcels v2.4.1 using a fourth-order Runge-Kutta method with a 5 minutes timestep. We advect approximately 360,000 to 400,000 for particles for each glacier (approximately 1,000 particles released daily for 1 year). The trajectories and temperature of the particles are used to study the transport and cooling of warm CDW to the grounding line of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers.