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Abstract. Subglacial topography beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is a fundamental control on its dynamics and response to changes in the climate system. Yet, it remains challenging to measure directly, and existing representations of the subglacial topography rely on a limited number of observations. Although the use of mass conservation and the development of BedMachine Greenland substantially improved the representation of the bed topography, this approach is limited to fast-flowing sectors and is less effective in regions with complex, alpine topography. As an alternative to traditional numerical methods, recent work has explored using Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), constrained by only one physical law, to solve forward and inverse problems in ice sheet modeling. Building on this work, we assess three PINN frameworks constrained by distinct conservation laws, showing that PINNs informed with a single conservation law are not sufficient for regions with sparse measurements and complex topographies. To that end, we introduce a novel approach that involves coupling two conservation laws within a PINN framework to infer the subglacial topography and test this approach for three regions with distinct environments in Greenland. This PINN is trained with both the conservation of mass and an approximation of the conservation of momentum (the Shelfy-Stream Approximation), which allows us to simultaneously infer the ice thickness and basal shear stress using observations of ice velocities, surface elevation, and the apparent mass balance in a mixed inversion problem. We compare the predicted ice thickness to ground-truth ice-penetrating radar measurements of ice thickness, showing that the PINN informed with two conservation laws is capable of inferring ice thickness in sparsely surveyed regions. Furthermore, comparisons of predicted bed topographies with BedMachine Greenland show that this approach is capable of discovering new bed features in slower-moving regions and in regions of complex topography, highlighting its potential for better constraining the bed topography of the Greenland Ice Sheet.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available September 22, 2026
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Predicting the future contributions of the ice sheets to sea level rise remains a significant challenge due to our limited understanding of key physical processes (e.g., basal friction, ice rheology) and the lack of observations of critical model inputs (e.g., bed topography). Traditional numerical models typically rely on data assimilation methods to estimate these variables by solving inverse problems based on conservation laws of mass, momentum, and energy. However, these methods are not versatile and require extensive code development to incorporate new physics. Moreover, their dependence on data alignment within computational grids hampers their adaptability, especially in the context of sparse data availability in space and time. To address these limitations, we developed PINNICLE (Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Ice and CLimatE), an open-source Python library dedicated to ice sheet modeling. PINNICLE seamlessly integrates observational data and physical laws, facilitating the solution of both forward and inverse problems within a single framework. PINNICLE currently supports a variety of conservation laws, including the Shelfy-Stream Approximation (SSA), Mono-Layer Higher-Order (MOLHO) models, and mass conservation equations, for both time-independent and time-dependent simulations. The library is user-friendly, requiring only the setting of a few hyperparameters for standard modeling tasks, while advanced users can define custom models within the framework. Additionally, PINNICLE is based on the DeepXDE library, which supports widely-used machine learning packages such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX, enabling users to select the backend that best fits their hardware. We describe here the implementation of PINNICLE and showcase this library with examples across the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets for a range of forward and inverse problems.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available April 2, 2026
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Predicting the future contributions of the ice sheets to sea-level rise remains a significant challenge due to our limited understanding of key physical processes (e.g., basal friction, ice rheology) and the lack of observations of critical model inputs (e.g., bed topography). Traditional numerical models typically rely on data assimilation methods to estimate these variables by solving inverse problems based on conservation laws of mass, momentum, and energy. However, these methods are not versatile and require extensive code development to incorporate new physics. Moreover, their dependence on data alignment within computational grids hampers their adaptability, especially in the context of sparse data availability in space and time. To address these limitations, we developed PINNICLE (Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Ice and CLimatE), an open-source Python library dedicated to ice sheet modeling. PINNICLE seamlessly integrates observational data and physical laws, facilitating the solution of both forward and inverse problems within a single framework. PINNICLE currently supports a variety of conservation laws, including the Shelfy-Stream Approximation (SSA), MOno-Layer Higher-Order (MOLHO) models, and mass conservation equations, for both time-independent and time-dependent simulations. The library is user-friendly, requiring only the setting of a few hyperparameters for standard modeling tasks, while advanced users can define custom models within the framework. Additionally, PINNICLE is based on the DeepXDE library, which supports widely used machine learning packages such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX, enabling users to select the backend that best fits their hardware. We describe here the implementation of PINNICLE and showcase this library with examples across the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets for a range of forward and inverse problems.more » « less
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