Sea ice formation in a coupled climate model including grease ice

Journal of Advances in Modelling Systems (2020)

The way that new sea ice forms in most climate models may result in new sea ice forming more quickly than it does in reality, prematurely closing areas of open water that are important to heat and gas exchange between the ocean and atmosphere, and impacting the earth’s albedo, and therefore its radiation budget.

In this work, we implement a more realistic representation of how new sea ice forms in a fully coupled climate model that introduces grease ice as a wind and oceanic stress‐dependent intermediary state between water and new sea ice. We demonstrate the effect using an ensemble of historical climate simulations.