The Parallel Ice Sheet Model is an open source, parallel, high-resolution ice sheet model:
- hierarchy of available stress balances
- marine ice sheet physics, dynamic calving fronts
- polythermal, enthalpy-based conservation of energy scheme
- extensible coupling to atmospheric and ocean models
- verification and validation tools
- complete documentation for users and developers
PISM is jointly developed at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). UAF developers are based in the Glaciers Group at the Geophysical Institute. It is supported by NASA Modeling, Analysis, and Prediction grant #NNX09AJ38G, and by a grant of resources from the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center.
PISM Application of the Month
February 2012
Click on the thumbnail to get PDF from the J. Glaciol. site.
| Fracture field for large-scale ice dynamics | |
| ice sheet: | Antarctic ice sheet |
| investigators: | Torsten Albrecht and Anders Levermann |
| venue: | Journal of Glaciology |
A macroscopic fracture-density field is introduced into PISM. Its evolution includes the initiation and growth of fractures as well as their advection with two-dimensional ice flow. To first approximation, fracture growth is assumed to depend on the spreading rate only, while fracture initiation is defined in terms of principal stresses. The inferred fracture-density fields compare well with observed elongate surface structures. The aim of this study is to introduce the field and investigate which of the observed surface structures can be reproduced by the simplest physically motivated fracture source terms.
Latest News
We have moved (and switched to PETSc 3.2)
- PISM now requires PETSc 3.2. For now, this change affects the development version, but the Spring 2012 stable0.5 release will be available at github.com only and will not support PETSc 3.1 and earlier.
PISM at 5 years and r2000 on gna.org. But we are moving!
As of 19 October 2011 we have committed 2000 revisions to PISM in the last five years, for an average of about one commit message per day. We can thank the generous public hosting of PISM at gna.org for this, and subversion too.
By the way, we are at least nine committers: Brown, Bueler, Khroulev, Shemonski, Aschwanden, Martin, Albrecht, Maxwell, Mengel. And quite a few other bug reporters and active users, too! Thanks to all.
But despite wallowing in nostalgia we are going to move source code hosts anyway!
The new host for PISM will be at github, and we will switch to using the git distributed version control system for managing PISM development. This is following the herd! However, with gna's unsigned certificate issues, and not quite keeping up to date, the UAF developers figure it is about time. We expect git will make improving the code easier after a bit of relearning version control. We will officially switch over pism-dev around November 1, but we will continue to host stable versions 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 through gna.org. If you are a PISM project member at gna.org you will get an invitation to be a collaborator at the new github site. (Or you can request to be a collaborator at the PISM github site.) Until that invitation announcing the move, please continue to use the gna.org host for commits, bugs, and tasks.
