Abstract
Abstract. The Arctic marginal ice zone (MIZ), where strong interactions between sea ice, ocean and atmosphere take place, is expanding as the result of ongoing sea ice retreat. Yet, state-of-the-art models exhibit significant biases in their representation of the complex ocean–sea ice interactions taking place in the MIZ. Here, we present the development of a new coupled sea ice–ocean wave model. This setup allows us to investigate some of the key processes at play in the MIZ. In particular, our coupling enables us to account for the wave radiation stress resulting from the wave attenuation by sea ice and the sea ice lateral melt resulting from the wave-induced sea ice fragmentation. We find that, locally in the MIZ, the ocean surface waves can affect the sea ice drift and melt, resulting in significant changes in sea ice concentration and thickness as well as sea surface temperature and salinity. Our results highlight the need to include wave–sea ice processes in models used to forecast sea ice conditions on short timescales. Our results also suggest that the coupling between waves and sea ice would ultimately need to be investigated in a more complex system, allowing for interactions with the ocean and the atmosphere.
Highlights
Numerical models exhibit large biases in their representation of Arctic sea ice concentration and thickness, regardless of their complexity or resolution (Stroeve et al, 2014; Chevallier et al, 2017; Wang et al, 2016; Lique et al, 2016)
Given that there is no coupling between the ocean and the wave components, the difference in sea surface properties must arise from variations in sea ice conditions and in particular the sea ice melt, and we investigate this further
Compared to the use of the parameterization of Lüpkes et al (2012) to estimate the floe size used in lateral melt, our parameterization strongly reduces the amount of sea ice melted laterally
Summary
Numerical models exhibit large biases in their representation of Arctic sea ice concentration and thickness, regardless of their complexity or resolution (Stroeve et al, 2014; Chevallier et al, 2017; Wang et al, 2016; Lique et al, 2016). The MIZ is characterized by a wide variety of processes resulting from the highly non-linear interactions between the atmosphere, ocean and sea ice: sea ice floe fragmentation and welding, lead opening and associated heat transfers, and mesoscale and submesoscale features arising from strong temperature and salinity gradients (see Lee et al, 2012, for a review and references therein), and many of these processes are only crudely (if at all) taken into account in models Some of these processes, sea ice fragmentation in particular, result from interactions between ocean surface waves and sea ice and are thought to be key for the dynamics and evolution of the MIZ (Thomson et al, 2018). Observations suggest that waves determine the shape and size of the sea ice floes in the MIZ, through the fragmentation occurring when the ice cover is deformed (Langhorne et al, 1998) or by controlling the formation of frazil and pancake ice
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