Many modern sea ice models used in global climate models represent the subgrid‐scale heterogeneity in sea ice thickness with an ice thickness distribution (ITD), which improves model realism by representing the significant impact of the high spatial heterogeneity of sea ice thickness on thermodynamic and dynamic processes. Most models default to five thickness categories. However, little has been done to explore the effects of the resolution of this distribution (number of categories) on sea‐ice feedbacks in a coupled model framework and resulting representation of the sea ice mean state. Here, we explore this using sensitivity experiments in CESM2 with the standard 5 ice thickness categories and 15 ice thickness categories. Increasing the resolution of the ITD in a run with preindustrial climate forcing results in substantially thicker Arctic sea ice year‐round. Analyses show that this is a result of the ITD influence on ice strength. With 15 ITD categories, weaker ice occurs for the same average thickness, resulting in a higher fraction of ridged sea ice. In contrast, the higher resolution of thin ice categories results in enhanced heat conduction and bottom growth and leads to only somewhat increased winter Antarctic sea ice volume. The spatial resolution of the ICESat‐2 satellite mission provides a new opportunity to compare model outputs with observations of seasonal evolution of the ITD in the Arctic (ICESat‐2; 2018–2021). Comparisons highlight significant differences from the ITD modeled with both runs over this period, likely pointing to underlying issues contributing to the representation of average thickness.
An Arctic sea ice‐ocean model is run with three uniform horizontal resolutions (6, 4, and 2 km) and identical sea ice and ocean model parameterizations, including an isotropic viscous‐plastic sea ice rheology, a mechanical ice strength parameterization, and an ice ridging parameterization. Driven by the same atmospheric forcing, the three model versions all produce similar spatial patterns and temporal variations of ice thickness and motion fields, resulting in almost identical magnitude and seasonal evolution of total ice volume and mean ice concentration, ice speed, and fractions of ice of various thickness categories over the Arctic Ocean. Increasing model resolution from 6 to 2 km does not significantly improve model performance when compared to NASA IceBridge ice thickness observations. This suggests that the large‐scale sea ice properties of the model are insensitive to varying high resolutions within the multifloe scale (2–10 km), and it may be unnecessary to adjust model parameters constantly with increasingly high resolutions. This is also true with models within the aggregate scale (10–75 km), indicating that model parameters used at coarse resolution may be used at high or multiscale resolution. However, even though the three versions all yield similar mean state of sea ice, they differ in representing anisotropic properties of sea ice. While they produce a basic pattern of major sea ice leads similar to satellite observations, their leads are distributed differently in space and time. Without changing model parameters and sea ice spatiotemporal variability, the 2‐km resolution model tends to capture more leads than the other two models.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10452793
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans
- Volume:
- 126
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2169-9275
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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