Impact of the ice thickness distribution discretization on the sea ice concentration variability in the NEMO3.6–LIM3  global ocean–sea ice model

Moreno-Chamarro, Eduardo; Ortega, Pablo; Massonnet, François

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-4773-2020

Articles | Volume 13, issue 10

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-4773-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean - NEMO

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-4773-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 10

Model evaluation paper

|

05 Oct 2020

Model evaluation paper |

| 05 Oct 2020

Impact of the ice thickness distribution discretization on the sea ice concentration variability in the NEMO3.6–LIM3 global ocean–sea ice model

Eduardo Moreno-Chamarro, Pablo Ortega, and François Massonnet

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-4773-2020-supplement

Data sets

Impact of the ice thickness distribution discretization on the sea ice concentration variability in the NEMO3.6-LIM3 global ocean–sea ice model Eduardo Moreno-Chamarro, Pablo Ortega, and François Massonnet https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3540757

Model code and software

fmassonn/paper-itd-seaice: Accepted paper François Massonnet https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3345604

Short summary

Climate models need to capture sea ice complexity to represent it realistically. Here we assess how distributing sea ice in discrete thickness categories impacts how sea ice variability is simulated in the NEMO3.6–LIM3 model. Simulations and satellite observations are compared by using k-means clustering of sea ice concentration in winter and summer between 1979 and 2014 at both poles. Little improvements in the modeled sea ice lead us to recommend using the standard number of five categories.