Abstract
A new collaborative organization for sea-ice model development, the CICE Consortium, has devised quality control procedures to maintain the integrity of its numerical codes' physical representations, enabling broad participation from the scientific community in the Consortium's open software development environment. Using output from five coupled and uncoupled configurations of the Los Alamos Sea Ice Model, CICE, we formulate quality control methods that exploit common statistical properties of sea-ice thickness, and test for significant changes in model results in a computationally efficient manner. New additions and changes to CICE are graded into four categories, ranging from bit-for-bit amendments to significant, answer-changing upgrades. These modifications are assessed using criteria that account for the high level of autocorrelation in sea-ice time series, along with a quadratic skill metric that searches for hemispheric changes in model answers across an array of different CICE configurations. These metrics also provide objective guidance for assessing new physical representations and code functionality.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Modelling of sea-ice phenomena’.
Highlights
Sea ice is a critical component of the Earth system, governing the high-latitude surface radiation balance and atmosphere–ocean exchanges of heat, moisture and momentum
A central tenet of our stewardship of CICE is the modeller’s equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath: additions and changes to CICE must not alter the answers of existing model configurations unless correcting scientifically proven errors or bugs, or updating the physics, biogeochemistry, numerics or parameter space of the model based on new research
0.1 m data assimilation scheme for satellite-derived sea surface height and temperature, sea-ice concentration, and in situ subsurface ocean observations. This reanalysis was initialized from a 9-year global HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM)/CICE simulation run with climatological forcing and was forced with NCEP CFSR/CFSRV2 atmospheric forcing [27,28] for a 17-year period beginning 1 October 1998
Summary
Sea ice is a critical component of the Earth system, governing the high-latitude surface radiation balance and atmosphere–ocean exchanges of heat, moisture and momentum. A central tenet of our stewardship of CICE is the modeller’s equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath: additions and changes to CICE must not alter the answers of existing model configurations unless correcting scientifically proven errors or bugs, or updating the physics, biogeochemistry, numerics or parameter space of the model based on new research. This development criterion is more onerous than it may seem, because CICE facilitates configurations so different from one another that they may barely be considered the same sea-ice model.
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