Start
November 17, 2021 - 3:00 pm
End
November 17, 2021 - 4:00 pm
Categories
Weather and Climate SystemsWeather and Climate Systems
Comparison of sea ice processes in observations and CESM2 data
Madeline Clark Frank
Wednesday, November 17
3:00 PM
Online
Arctic amplification is generally well represented in climate models. However, even the most sophisticated climate models have been unable to capture observed trends in various Arctic processes such as changes in sea ice extent and Arctic cyclones. These differences may be due in part to short term sea ice changes caused by specific atmospheric drivers not being captured. We compare CESM2 LE sea ice extent to datasets from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and CESM LE data. Analyzing the power spectrum of CESM2 LE sea ice extent indicates that while the annual cycle is captured by the model, short term processes are not even though synoptic scale changes in sea ice extent are significant in NSIDC data. Additionally we characterize the relative importance of various atmospheric processes to synoptic scale sea ice loss by utilizing maximum covariance analysis. These analyses are performed on ERA5 and CESM2 LE data to identify potentially absent processes in CESM2.