  Water-ice systems undergoing melting develop complex spatio-temporal
interface dynamics and a non-trivial temperature field. In this contribution,
we present computational aspects of a recently conducted validation study that
aims at investigating the role of natural convection for cryo-interface
dynamics of water-ice. We will present a fixed grid model known as the enthalpy
porosity method. It is based on introducing a phase field and employs mixture
theory. The resulting PDEs are solved using a finite volume discretization. The
second part is devoted to experiments that have been conducted for model
validation. The evolving water-ice interface is tracked based on optical images
that shows both the water and the ice phase. To segment the phases, we use a
binary Mumford Shah method, which yields a piece-wise constant approximation of
the imaging data. Its jump set is the reconstruction of the measured phase
interface. Our combined simulation and segmentation effort finally enables us
to compare the modeled and measured phase interfaces continuously. We conclude
with a discussion of our findings.
