Automated forward and adjoint modelling of viscoelastic deformation of the solid Earth

Scott, William; Hoggard, Mark; Duvernay, Thomas; Ghelichkhan, Sia; Gibson, Angus; Roberts, Dale; Kramer, Stephan C.; Davies, D. Rhodri

doi:10.5194/gmd-19-2717-2026

Articles | Volume 19, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-2717-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

The Firedrake automatic code generation system

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-2717-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 7

Development and technical paper

|

10 Apr 2026

Development and technical paper |

| 10 Apr 2026

Automated forward and adjoint modelling of viscoelastic deformation of the solid Earth

William Scott, Mark Hoggard, Thomas Duvernay, Sia Ghelichkhan, Angus Gibson, Dale Roberts, Stephan C. Kramer, and D. Rhodri Davies

Model code and software

G-ADOPT code and runscripts associated with 'Automated forward and adjoint modelling of viscoelastic deformation of the solid Earth' William Scott https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16925270

g-adopt/g-adopt: Zenodo_20260306.0 William Scott et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18886888

Software used in “Automated forward and adjoint modelling of viscoelastic deformation of the solid Earth” firedrake zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18880361

Short summary

Melting ice sheets drive solid Earth deformation and sea-level change on timescales of decades to thousands of years. Here, we present G-ADOPT (Geoscientific Adjoint Optimisation Platform), which models movement of the solid Earth in response to surface loads. It has flexibility in domain geometry, deformation mechanism parameterisation, and is scalable on high performance computers. Automatic derivation of adjoint sensitivity kernels also provides a means to assimilate historical and modern observations into future sea-level forecasts.