The edge-on protoplanetary disk HH 48 NE II. Modeling ices and silicates

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