Presented by:
Alex West Met Office
Date:
Friday 15th September 2017 - 16:20 to 16:40
Venue:
INI Seminar Room 1
Abstract:
Since 1993 the Arctic
Ocean has seen the deployment of over 100 ice mass balance buoys (IMBs),
devices which measure elevation of the sea ice surface and base, as well as
internal ice temperatures at a vertical resolution of 10cm. Here the thermodynamic data provided by the
IMBs is used to evaluate the sea ice simulation of the CMIP5 model HadGEM2-ES,
which simulates anomalously high summer melting and winter freezing in the recent
historical period. Monthly mean fluxes
of topmelt, snowfall, conduction, basal growth and ocean-to-ice heat are
calculated for the entire IMB network, giving a distribution of around 500 data
points for each variable. Model evaluation is concentrated in two regions of
the Arctic that are particularly densely sampled by the IMBs, the North Pole
and the Beaufort Sea. Distributions of modelled and observed fluxes in these
regions are compared, and severe biases in June top melting fluxes and winter
conductive fluxes are identified which are too large to be attributed to
sampling biases in the IMBs. Consistent
with previously identified biases in the Arctic climate simulation of
HadGEM2-ES, the results allow detailed attribution of the sea ice simulation
biases to particular drivers in the atmosphere and sea ice.
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