Abstract

We implement a damage parametrization in the standard viscous-plastic sea ice model to disentangle the effect of rheology (elasto-brittle vs visco-plastic) from the damage parametrization in their abilities to reproduce observed scaling laws of deformation. To this end, we test the sensitivity of the VP sea ice model to the inclusion of damage and compare the resulting deformation fields to those from the RADARSAT Geophysical Processor System (RGPS) using the metrics proposed in SIR Ex, i.e. scaling properties, and multifractality of divergence and shear strain rate. Results show that the inclusion of a damage parametrization inside the standard viscous-plastic model brings all spatial deformation rate statistics, except temporal scaling, in line with observations from RGPS without the need to modify the mechanical strength (yield curve) of sea ice. Adding a damage parametrization to the standard VP model proves to be a powerful low-cost knob to adjust the deformation statistics of viscous-plastic sea ice models.