4.1. Overview

Icepack is a column physics package designed to be used in other broader sea ice models, such as CICE, SIS, or even in ocean models. Icepack includes options for simulating sea ice thermodynamics, mechanical redistribution (ridging) and associated area and thickness changes. In addition, the model supports a number of tracers, including thickness, enthalpy, ice age, first-year ice area, deformed ice area and volume, melt ponds, and biogeochemistry.

Icepack is called on a grid point by grid point basis. All data is passed in and out of the model via subroutine interfaces. Fortran “use” statements are not encouraged for accessing data inside the Icepack model.

Icepack does not generally contain any parallelization or I/O. The driver of Icepack is expected to support those features. Icepack can be called concurrently across multiple MPI tasks. Icepack should also be thread safe.