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Welcome to the Icepack wiki!

This repository contains the Icepack sea ice column physics code, which was separated from the CICE sea ice numerical model after CICE v5.1.2 was released. CICE includes Icepack as a git submodule.

Release Notes

Code documentation is included within each code repository, and links to data and other information can be found on the wiki pages of each repository.

Release information from CICE versions prior to version 6 is contained in the Release Notes links from the CICE-svn-trunk repository.

Icepack releases are “functional releases” in the sense that the code runs, does not crash, passes various tests, and requires further work to establish its scientific validity. In general, users are not encouraged to use any of the CICE Consortium’s model configurations to obtain “scientific” results. The test configurations are useful for model development, but sea ice models must be evaluated from a physical standpoint in a couple system because simplified configurations do not necessarily represent what is actually happening in the fully coupled system that includes interactive ocean and atmosphere components.

Documentation

Detailed and searchable online documentation of Icepack can be found at https://cice-consortium.github.io/Icepack with the following sections:

• Quick Start, which has instructions for running the model.
• Science guide
• User guide with a Testing subsection with instructions for setting up standard tests (e.g. regression, restart).
• Developer guide with a Documentation subsection with instructions on how to update documentation using Sphinx along with code development.
• Index

Note that the documentation Table of Contents can be accessed at any point by clicking the upper left hand "Icepack x.x.xx documentation" link.

CICE Git Workflow Guidance (includes instructions for working with Icepack)

The About-Us repository and wiki contain additional information, including contact information and instructions for code developers.

The FAQ includes questions regarding both CICE and Icepack.

Porting

To port Icepack to your machine, you may do the following:

1. Install external software.

• a Fortran compiler
• gnuplot is needed only for visualization of test results using the script in Icepack

2. Download Icepack. We recommend using github to interact with the Consortium; other download options are listed in the README.md file.

• fork the Icepack repository
• clone the code as described in the CICE Git Workflow Guidance

3. Follow instructions as in the "Quick Start" section of the documentation.
4. Download and untar the forcing data to the location defined in the scripts (ICEPACK_MACHINE_INPUTDATA in the env file), for basic testing.

Icepack is also downloaded automatically when CICE is cloned. We recommend making changes to Icepack via a separate repository rather than using the version linked as a CICE submodule, unless changes to CICE must also be made concurrently. See the CICE Git Workflow Guidance.

Testing

See Testing Icepack for links to testing information and near-surface forcing data. Results from our standard suite of tests can be found in the Test Results wiki.

CICE Community Discussion

A community bulletin board has been set up for the CICE Consortium community to discuss model development including bugs, diagnostics, and future directions. There are subforums for discussion of particular topics (e.g. repository questions) as well as a general forum. These forums will be monitored by Consortium members but are open to the general community. To start or respond to a discussion topic users will need to create an account by clicking the "Login" button at the top of the page and then following the directions under "Create new account."