  The abundance and distribution of ice in protoplanetary disks (PPD) is
critical to understand the linkage between the composition of circumstellar
matter and the composition of exoplanets. Edge-on PPDs are a useful tool to
constrain such ice composition and its location in the disk, as ice spectral
signatures can be observed in absorption against the continuum emission arising
from the warmer central disk regions. The aim of this work is to model ice
absorption features in PPDs and determine how well the abundance of the main
ice species across the disk can be determined within the uncertainty of the
physical parameter space. The edge-on PPD around HH 48 NE, a target of the JWST
ERS program IceAge, is used as a reference system. We use RADMC-3D to raytrace
the mid-infrared continuum. Using a constant parameterized ice abundance, ice
opacities are added to the dust opacity in regions wherever the disk is cold
enough for the main carbon, oxygen and nitrogen carriers to freeze out. The
global abundance of the main ice carriers in HH 48 NE can be determined within
a factor of 3, when taking the uncertainty of the physical parameters into
account. Ice features in PPDs can be saturated at an optical depth <1, due to
local saturation. Spatially observed ice optical depths cannot be directly
related to column densities due to radiative transfer effects. Vertical
snowlines will not be a clear transition due to the radially increasing height
of the snowsurface, but their location may be constrained from observations
using radiative transfer modeling. Radial snowlines are not really accesible.
Not only the ice abundance, but also inclination, settling, grain size
distribution and disk mass have strong impact on the observed ice absorption
features in disks. Relative changes in ice abundance can be inferred from
observations only if the source structure is well constrained
