Figure 2. Study area and model domain.

(a) Ice surface and bed longitudinal profile for GrIS flowline at FOXX study site (thin lines) compared with those for idealized model domain (thick dashed lines). (b) Schematic of model domain showing ice surface (light blue) and bed topography (orange). The model study site is indicated by red vertical line. The channel added during the summer simulations is shown by the dark blue line. Purple line on ice sheet surface indicates equilibrium line above which no runoff occurs. Note that the figure is not to scale and the actual grid spacing used in the model is Δx=Δy=200 m. Inset: schematic of how weakly connected system is represented in the numerical model. Within each grid cell (black box), a fraction of the area, f_w, is assumed to be covered by patches of the weakly connected system (dark regions), with the remaining area being composed of the distributed system (light regions). For simplicity, the shape of the weakly connected system is assumed to be many small circular regions, though in reality we expect it to be highly irregular.