Effects of damage on the scaling laws of viscous-plastic sea ice

Sea ice deformations occur along well-defined lines of deformation called linear kinematic features (LKFs), which exhibit complex laws like spatiotemporal scaling. The complexity of these interactions is undeniable, and a desirable sea ice model should represent LKFs adequately since various processes affecting heat, salt, and moisture exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere occur along these LKFs. This multifractal property of LKFs can be seen in observations and models. However, fine-scale LKFs happen at high resolution (0-2 km), and high-resolution models are costly to run, hence the importance of parametrizing these sub-grid phenomena. Different models are more or less in agreement with the observations, and one model, the Maxwell-Elasto-Brittle model (MEB), claims to reproduce the observed spatiotemporal scaling laws better than the standard viscous-plastic model (VP). One reason could be the presence of an ice damage parametrization in the MEB model that has no equivalent in the VP model. Therefore, we include a suitable damage parametrization with advection in the VP model to disentangle the effect of rheology from the effects of damage on the scaling laws. Results show that the deformation statistics in the VP model are influenced by the inclusion of damage in the model. The inclusion of this damage parametrization gives scaling exponents in agreement with the commonly accepted values computed from the RGPS observations, hinting that damage parametrizations play a crucial role in sea ice models.