ClimaSeaIce.jl

ClimaSeaIce.jl is Julia software for simulating the freezing, melting, and horizontal motion of sea ice on CPUs and GPUs. It is designed for climate-scale sea-ice modeling, supports standalone simulations, and can be coupled to ocean models built with Oceananigans.jl.

What ClimaSeaIce provides

• Sea-ice thermodynamics for freezing, melting, conductive heat transfer, and surface and basal heat-flux parameterizations.
• Sea-ice dynamics with explicit and split-explicit momentum solvers.
• Multiple rheological closures, including viscous and elasto-visco-plastic options.
• Support for standalone sea-ice models and models coupled to Oceananigans-based ocean simulations.

Installation

Install the latest registered release with

using Pkg
Pkg.add("ClimaSeaIce")

To use the development version from GitHub, use

using Pkg
Pkg.add(url = "https://github.com/CliMA/ClimaSeaIce.jl")

Documentation

Documentation is available at:

• Stable documentation
• Development documentation

The documentation includes model setup, physics descriptions, examples, and internal implementation notes.

Quick start

The main entry point is SeaIceModel. Thermodynamic parameterizations live under SeaIceThermodynamics, and momentum closures and rheologies live under SeaIceDynamics and Rheologies.

Example scripts are available in examples/.

Citing

If you use ClimaSeaIce.jl in research, teaching, or derived software, please cite the Zenodo record:

Silvestri, S. et al. (2026). CliMA/ClimaSeaIce.jl: v0.5.6 (v0.5.6). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16143708