Abstract
Arctic sea ice plays a vital role in modulating the global climate. In the most recent decades, the rapid decline of the Arctic summer sea ice cover has exposed increasing areas of ice-free ocean, with sufficient fetch for waves to develop. This has highlighted the complex and not well-understood nature of wave-ice interactions, requiring modeling effort. Here, we introduce two independent parameterizations in a high-resolution coupled ice-ocean model to investigate the effects of wave-induced sea ice break-up (through albedo change) and mixing on the Arctic sea ice simulation. Our results show that wave-induced sea ice break-up leads to increases in sea ice concentration and thickness in the Bering Sea, the Baffin Sea and the Barents Sea during the ice growth season, but accelerates the sea ice melt in the Chukchi Sea and the East Siberian Sea in summer. Further, wave-induced mixing can decelerate the sea ice formation in winter and the sea ice melt in summer by exchanging the heat fluxes between the surface and subsurface layer. As our baseline model underestimates sea ice cover in winter and produces more sea ice in summer, wave-induced sea ice break-up plays a positive role in improving the sea ice simulation. This study provides two independent parameterizations to directly include the wave effects into the sea ice models, with important implications for the future sea ice model development.
Highlights
Sea ice is crucial for modulating the global climate, because the sea ice cover reflects incoming solar radiation, and because it creates an insulating layer between the ocean and the atmosphere
PMderived sea ice concentration employs a cut-off of 15% to mark the ice edge
We have investigated the wave effects on the Arctic sea ice simulation using a high-resolution coupled ice-ocean model
Summary
Sea ice is crucial for modulating the global climate, because the sea ice cover reflects incoming solar radiation, and because it creates an insulating layer between the ocean and the atmosphere. The decrease of sea ice cover due to global warming affects Arctic shipping and engineering, such as transforming the Arctic into a navigable ocean with broken small floating ice floes [4] and ice-water-structure interaction [5]. Under this condition, wave-ice interactions become an important and challenging topic that needs to be considered in sea ice models to improve the performance of sea ice simulations
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