In Situ Real-time Ice Calving Event Detection

Investigators: Nagiza Samatova, Suren Byna, John Wu, Chris Zou, Dan Martin

Problem

Ice calving, i.e., a process of ice breaking off an ice sheet creating massive icebergs, is highly important to global sea level changes. Detecting ice calving events and removing floating ice in real time is necessary to avoid mathematical divergence in AMR-based ice sheet model simulation codes such as BISICLES.

An example of ice calving event on the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf

Approach

• Develop a novel AMR-aware Parallel Connected Component Labeling (PCCL) algorithm
• PCCL identifies connectivity at each AMR level in parallel, propagates “grounded-ness” across AMR levels, and performs communication-efficient hierarchical aggregation among MPI processes

Achievements

• PCCL is capable of real-time detection of ice calving events in BISICLES code
• 6X faster than the existing detection algorithm
• Integration of PCCL into Chombo-based BISICLES code
• Paper presented at CCGrid 2015