A fully coupled Arctic sea ice-ocean-atmosphere model (ArcIOAM v1.0) based on C-Coupler2: model description and preliminary results

Abstract. The implementation of a new Arctic regional coupled sea ice-ocean-atmosphere model (ArcIOAM) and its preliminary results in the year of 2012 are presented in this paper. A newly developed coupler, C-Coupler2 (the Community Coupler 2), is used to couple the Arctic sea ice-oceanic configuration of the MITgcm (Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model) with the Arctic atmospheric configuration of the Polar WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) model. ArcIOAM is demonstrated with focus on seasonal simulation of the Arctic sea ice and ocean state in the year of 2012. The results obtained by ArcIOAM, along with the experiment of one-way coupling strategy, are compared with available observational data and reanalysis products. From the comparison, results obtained from two experiments both realistically capture the sea ice and oceanic variables in the Arctic region over a 1-year simulation period. The two-way coupled model has better performance in terms of sea ice extent, concentration, thickness and SST, especially in summer. This indicates that sea ice-ocean-atmosphere interaction takes a crucial role in controlling Arctic summertime sea ice distribution. The coupled model and documentation are available at  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3742692 (last access: 9 June 2020), and the source code is maintained at  https://github.com/cdmpbp123/Coupled_Atm_Ice_Oce (last access: 7 April 2020).