Articles | Volume 18, issue 10
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-3041-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-3041-2025
Model evaluation paper
 | 
27 May 2025
Model evaluation paper |  | 27 May 2025

CMIP6 models overestimate sea ice melt, growth and conduction relative to ice mass balance buoy estimates

Alex E. West and Edward W. Blockley

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Cited articles

Batrak, Y. and Müller, M.: On the warm bias in atmospheric reanalyses induced by the missing snow over Arctic sea-ice, Nat. Commun., 10, 4170, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11975-3, 2019. 
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Short summary
This study uses ice mass balance buoys – temperature- and height-measuring devices frozen into sea ice – to find how well climate models simulate (1) melt and growth of Arctic sea ice and (2) conduction of heat through Arctic sea ice. This may help understand why models produce varying amounts of sea ice in the present day. We find that models tend to show more melt, growth or conduction for a given ice thickness than the buoys, although the difference is smaller for models with more physically realistic thermodynamics.
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