  Linear Kinematic Features (LKFs) are found everywhere in the Arctic sea ice
cover. They are strongly localized deformations often associated with the
formation of leads and pressure ridges. Viscous-plastic sea ice models start to
generate LKFs at high spatial grid resolution, typically with a grid spacing
below 5 km. Besides grid spacing, other aspects of a numerical implementation,
such as discretization details, may affect the number and definition of
simulated LKFs. To explore these effects, the solutions of sea ice models with
different grid spacings, mesh types, and numerical discretization techniques
are compared in an idealized configuration, which could also serve as a
benchmark problem in the future. The A, B, and C-grid discretizations of sea
ice dynamics on quadrilateral meshes leads to a similar number of LKFs as the
A-grid approximation on triangular meshes (with the same number of vertices).
The discretization on an Arakawa CD-grid on both structured quadrilateral and
triangular meshes resolves the same number of LKFs as conventional Arakawa
A-grid, B-grid, and C-grid approaches, but on two times coarser meshes. This is
due to the fact that the CD-grid approach has a higher number of degrees of
freedom to discretize the velocity field. Due to its enhanced resolving
properties, the CD-grid discretization is an attractive alternative to
conventional discretizations.
