Fragmentation and melting of the seasonal sea ice cover
Abstract
Recent years have seen a rapid reduction in the summer extent of Arctic sea ice. This trend has implications for navigation, oil exploration, wildlife, and local communities. Furthermore the Arctic sea ice cover impacts the exchange of heat and momentum between the ocean and atmosphere with significant teleconnections across the climate system, particularly mid to low latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. The treatment of melting and break-up processes of the seasonal sea ice cover within climate models is currently limited. In particular floes are assumed to have a uniform size which does not evolve with time. Observations suggest however that floe sizes can be modelled as truncated power law distributions, with different exponents for smaller and larger floes. This study aims to examine factors controlling the floe size distribution in the seasonal and marginal ice zone. This includes lateral melting, wave induced break-up of floes, and the feedback between floe size and the mixed ocean layer. These results are then used to quantify the proximate mechanisms of seasonal sea ice reduction in a sea ice—ocean mixed layer model. Observations are used to assess and calibrate the model. The impacts of introducing these processes to the model will be discussed and the preliminary results of sensitivity and feedback studies will also be presented.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.C33C1203F
- Keywords:
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- 0736 Snow;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0750 Sea ice;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0770 Properties;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 4540 Ice mechanics and air/sea/ice exchange processes;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL