SENSITIVITY OF SEA ICE INITIALISATION IN A COUPLED GLOBAL OCEAN-ICE MODEL

摘要

This paper reports three contrasting sea ice numerical experiments. These are a forced reference simulation, without any sea ice data assimilation, and two simulations where the sea ice concentration from observations is used to constrain the numerical model. One nudging scheme has a spatially uniform relaxation time scale, and the other has a spatially-varying relaxation time scale. We find discernible differences, both between each of these three simulations runs, and between the model outputs and the data sets, for both Arctic sea ice extent and especially for the sea ice volume. Comparison of the sea ice thickness with satellite observations would suggest that the simulation with the spatially-varying nudging scheme produces more realistic patterns than either of the other two simulations.