INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERE PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Research news
PICTURE: SCHEMATIC DIAGRAM OF THE SEA-ICE SIMULATION ERROR SOURCES OF A REGIONAL CONFIGURATION OF MITGCM. Show more CREDIT: YUE SUN
Arctic sea ice has been declining rapidly over the past few decades, and changes in Arctic sea ice can have significant effects on global weather and climate through interactions with the atmosphere and oceans. In addition, the Arctic shipping routes are a shortcut to connect the major countries of the Northern Hemisphere. The Arctic is also rich in natural and biological resources. The simulation of the Arctic sea ice could provide valuable information for Arctic shipping as well as for climate studies. Therefore, there is an urgent need to assess the ability to simulate the Arctic sea ice and diagnose the causes of simulation errors.
To address the problem of identifying sources of error, Prof. Fei Zheng and his team from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences evaluated the sea ice simulations of the Arctic regional ocean-ice coupling configuration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology General Circulation Model (MITgcm).
“We evaluated the model’s performance in the arctic cold season (March) and warm season (September) and found that the model performance was different in the two months,” says Zheng. “Due to the uncertainty of the model, the insufficient response of the model to the signal from atmospheric forces and the insufficient response to the ocean boundary signal, there were disagreements between the simulations and observations in both March and September.”
According to her article published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, the properties of seasonally varying sources of model error could be fully accounted for using an ensemble approach to achieve the goal of improving the simulation and prediction of Arctic sea ice in different seasons in future work.
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From EurekAlert!
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