Damaging viscous-plastic sea ice

Abstract. We implement a damage parametrization in the standard viscous-plastic sea ice model to disentangle its effect from model physics (visco-elastic or elasto-brittle vs. visco-plastic) on its ability to reproduce observed scaling laws of deformation. To this end, we compare scaling properties and multifractality of simulated divergence and shear strain rate (as proposed in SIREx1), with those derived from the RADARSAT Geophysical Processor System (RGPS). Results show that including a damage parametrization in the standard viscous-plastic model increases the spatial, but decreases temporal localization of simulated Linear Kinematic Features, and brings all spatial deformation rate statistics in line with observations from RGPS without the need to increase the mechanical shear strength of sea ice as recently proposed for lower resolution viscous-plastic sea ice models. In fact, including damage an healing timescale of t_h = 30 days and an increased mechanical strength unveil multifractal behavior that does not fit the theory. Therefore, a damage parametrization is a powerful tuning knob affecting the deformation statistics.