mccarthy

Copyright 2010--2026 Ed Bueler

This repository contains slides, notes, exercises, and computer programs for numerical glacier and ice sheet modeling. These materials have been used for the International Summer School in Glaciology, McCarthy, AK in years 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2022, 2024, and 2026.

Download

Download all materials by one of these methods:

• use the releases page for a .zip/.tar.gz archive

• clone or shallow clone this repository:

  git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/bueler/mccarthy.git

The optional depth=1 setting reduces the download size by not getting the history, which most users will not need.

Slides, exercises, and notes

The PDF slides slides/slides-2026.pdf cover the essential material in the briefest way. They are supported by Python codes in py/. There are exercises and notes which are aligned to the slides, and also support them.

Python programs

The Python codes in subdirectory py/ solve surface kinematic equation (SKE) and shallow ice approximation (SIA) problems. The primary Python programs surface1d.py and shallowuw.py use only the numpy and matplotlib libraries.

You are encouraged to actually run and modify these codes! Feel free to email me about how they work.

The slides and the notes are the documentation for the Python codes, along with line comments in the .py source codes.

The surface2d.py program uses Firedrake (a finite element library) which calls PETSc for equation solvers.

The codes in py/stokes/ also use Firedrake to solve a 2D Glen-law Stokes flow over a bedrock step. The workflow for the Stokes codes also use Gmsh (a mesh generator) and Paraview (for visualization). See py/stokes/doc.pdf for more information. See also my tutorial for using Firedrake to solve the Stokes equations, which is in a separate repository.

Please report any bugs in the codes either by email or by using the issues for this repository.

Older material

Older and deprecated material is in the form of PDF notes (see old/notes/), slides (see slides/old/, and Matlab/Octave programs (see old/mfiles/). Even older versions (2009--2014) of this material lives in the repo github.com/bueler/karthaus.