Operational modeling of sea ice in Arctic and Greenlandic Waters

Date: 29.10.2015

Time: 11:00 - 12:00

Place: Nordlys, DMI

Contact: Cathrine Fox Maule

As offshore activities increases in Arctic regions, the importance of forecasting ocean and sea ice parameters increases as well.  DMI runs a coupled ocean (HYCOM) and sea ice (CICE) model as an operational system covering the Arctic and North Atlantic, forced by the ECMWF operational atmospheric model. The resolution of the model system is around 10km. This system runs twice a day and produces forecast for 6 days. In addition to the forecast, a 10 year hindcast (2004 – 2013) has been simulated.

This presentation will focus on different aspects of modeling sea ice and evaluate the forecast especially with links to the remote sensing group at DMI. It will also discuss links to users and operational activities at DMI and two research projects that DMI is involved in. The two projects are:

1/ Ice observations and forecast are typically spread out on multiple platforms which complicates comparisons and usage of different sea ice products. DMI is involved in the EU project (PolarIce) where the aim is to build a platform that collects these data sets and thereby ease the access. Based on this project a comparison of sea ice thickness of different MYOCEAN products, SMOS ice thicknesses and the two DMI forecast will be evaluated.

2/ Ice surface temperatures are the upper thermodynamic boundary condition of the sea ice model, thus it has a large effect on the thermodynamic growth and melt of sea ice. The model system is  involved in the project Globtemperature where the aim is to evaluate the feasibility of using observed ice surface temperatures to validate the upper thermodynamic boundary condition of the sea ice model and if possible to use the observations as assimilation.