Abstract

As Earth’s large reservoirs of fresh water, glaciers and ice sheets are important components of the global climate system. Humans feel their impacts most acutely through changes in glacier meltwater and global sea level, as glaciers and ice sheets grow or decay in response to climate forcing and internally controlled dynamics. In this talk, Dr. Tong Zhang will make a thorough introduction of the numerical ice flow models that glaciologists are currently applying in the simulations of the dynamic features of glaciers and ice sheets. He will also present progresses of the ongoing efforts for ice flow modelings in China, the OpenICE and PoLIM projects.

Presenter Profile

Dr. Tong Zhang received the BSc in Material Physics from Northwestern Polytechnical University and got the PhD in Physical Geography from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. As a visiting research assistant, he worked on the development of the full Stokes ice sheet model FELIX-S in the Department of Mathematics, University of South Carolina. He is now an assistant professor in the Institute of Polar Meteorology, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. During the past decade, he organized and joined many expeditions to Tibetan glaciers, Greenland ice sheet and Arctic region. He is one of the main authors of the glacier model PoLIM and FELIX-S.