Sea ice is a critically important component of the climate because it mitigates against global warming. In the last decades, sea ice extent has declined drastically over both poles, with consequences on global temperature and weather patterns.
Current climate models cannot reliably predict these changes, in part because they cannot represent the individual pieces (floes) that make up the ice pack. As part of a multi-university initiative, we developed a unique model (SubZero) that resolves individual floes and their complex interactions with the ocean. This model revealed important new physics that control ice breakage and melt, but was constrained to small domains due to computational limitations of the model.
This project will improve SubZero’s parallelization and coupling infrastructure to enable basin-wide climate simulations. We will use these developments to better understand and forecast the response of sea ice to extreme storm events and anthropogenic climate change.
