Predicting ice sheet evolution

Research background

The Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets are interactive components of the global climate system. Currently, future climate projections exclude dynamic ice sheets from their simulations. Including ice sheet representation in earth system models (ESMs) allows researchers to consider the co-evolution of ice sheets and climate, and quantify their interactions and feedbacks.

Alanna Alevropoulos-Borrill (pictured at right) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington. She uses numerical ice sheet models to understand the future evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and its contribution to global sea level change. She leads a project for the Antarctic Research Centre that is working to incorporate dynamic ice sheets, using the BISICLES ice sheet model, into the New Zealand Earth System Model (NZESM).

Coupling these models enhances their capability and gives New Zealand climate researchers a new opportunity to participate in international model comparisons.

Project challenges

Alanna was running the NZESM on Māui, a supercomputer co-hosted by New Zealand eScience Infrastructure and NIWA, but the model kept crashing and failing to run. She sought help from Research Software Engineer Alexander Pletzer to debug the problem.

What was done

Alexander worked with Alanna to solve the NetCDF error causing the code to crash. He also developed an Apptainer definition file that allows Alanna to build and run her code on Māui and also run the same executable on different computing platforms.

Main outcomes

Building coupled earth system models is time consuming and such models often can run only on a specific platform due to their dependency on external libraries. Using a containerised approach, Alanna is now able to more easily share her research software with colleagues around the world.

Researcher feedback

It has been a pleasure to be supported by Alex and Chris on this project. Not only have they helped in getting the model running and containerised but they’ve also taken the time to help me upskill in my version control and debugging processes.

Alanna Alevropoulos-Borrill, Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington

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