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Wave – Sea Ice Interactions in Global Climate Simulations of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM)

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Abstract

Accurately representing the processes of ocean surface wave interactions with Earth’s atmosphere, sea ice, and coasts, as well as internal ocean mixing, remains an important aspect of climate physics we are yet to fully understand, especially true of Earth’s polar regions. Wave-sea ice interactions are often missing from earth system models, but even when they are included, documented simulations have been of such resolution that other important factors in the maintenance of the marginal ice zone, including ocean eddies and atmospheric mesoscale lows, are missing. For this reason, we are incorporating the WAVEWATCH III (WW3) spectral wave model into the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) to better understand the impact of ocean waves in the presence of finer scale ocean and atmospheric physics in climate simulations. E3SM facilitates regionally refined eddy-permitting ocean and mesoscale atmospheric resolutions in polar regions to allow us to explore multiple influences in maintaining the ice edge.  Utilizing the sea ice floe size distribution within the sea ice component of E3SM (MPAS-Sea Ice) and incorporating two-way coupling between WW3 and MPAS-Sea Ice, this work explores the implications of waves in a fully coupled climate system as well as the critical interactions between waves and sea ice in polar regions. We present the new wave - sea ice coupling infrastructure within E3SM as well as some preliminary results highlighting the importance of interactions between waves and sea ice on global climate scales.

Category
High Latitude
Coastal
Funding Program Area(s)
Additional Resources:
NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center)