OpenICE (Open Ice Code/Emulator) is a project for simulating ice flow of alpine glaciers and ice sheets in polar regions, Antarctica and Greenland. Glaciers and ice sheets are key components in the cryosphere and have great impacts on the freshwater resources, sea level rise and climate system. By OpenICE, we hope to find a numerical solution than can be applied in simulations of both single glacier dynamics and regional glacier changes. By OpenICE, we hope to bring more public attention to glaciology.

As you all know, glaciology is always a tiny area that many people will be interested on but are difficult to get involved in. Due to high requirements of multidiscipilinary, for example, glaciology, mathematics and physics, the numerical modeling study of glaciers and ice sheet is a sort of monster that people will most likely avoid touching it. However, despite using a lot codings and calculations, ice flow models are still geophysical or glaciological. They are made to solve real glaciological problems that have been happening on our living planet. Thus, for OpenIce, we don't want to build a pure mathematical code that adopts complex computation processes only. Instead, we would be very happy to be pragmatic and make our codes as useful as possible.

OpenICE will be designed and published freely under the GNU licences. We hope more researchers/glaciologists to get interested on it. For this purpose we will also write tutorials that beginners will find easy to play with. We'd like to supply the physical background in great details and combine it with current glaciological observations and understandings. At this stage we will focus only on the Shallow Ice Approximation (SIA) and First Order (FO) models in two and three dimensions.