Sea ice modelling improved by including effects of falling snow

Tuesday, July 11th, 2017

AVdP sea ice interface 760x360recent study has demonstrated that including consideration of the radiative effects of falling snow can improve simulations of Antarctic sea-ice. These improvements can increase confidence in projected Antarctic sea level contributions and changes in global warming driven by long-term changes in Southern Ocean feedbacks.

To address common disagreements between observations and modelled sea-ice cover the authors included the radiative effects in the CESM1 model. The results reduced differences between models and measurements mainly due to increased wintertime longwave heating restricting sea-ice growth and so reducing summer albedo.

Jui-Lin Li, Mark Richardson, Yulan Hong, Wei-Liang Lee, Yi-Hui Wang, Jia-Yuh Yu, Eric Fetzer, Graeme Stephens, Yinghui Liu, “Improved simulation of Antarctic sea ice due to the radiative effects of falling snow”, Environ. Res. Lett., 2017.  DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aa7a17

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