Anisotropic radial basis function methods for continental size ice sheet simulations

Abstract In this paper we develop and implement anisotropic radial basis function methods for simulating the dynamics of ice sheets and glaciers. We test the methods on two problems: the well-known benchmark ISMIP-HOM B that corresponds to a glacier size ice and a synthetic ice sheet whose geometry is inspired by the EISMINT benchmark that corresponds to a continental size ice sheet. We illustrate the advantages of the radial basis function methods over a standard finite element method. We also show how the use of anisotropic radial basis functions allows for accurate simulation of the velocities on a large ice sheet, which was not possible with standard isotropic radial basis function methods due to a small ratio between the typical thickness and length of an ice sheet. Additionally, we implement a partition of unity method in order to improve the computational efficiency of the radial basis function methods.