Observed Antarctic sea ice expansion reproduced in a climate model after correcting biases in sea ice drift velocity.

ABSTRACT: The Antarctic sea ice area expanded significantly during 1979-2015. This is at odds with state-of-the-art climate models, which typically simulate a receding Antarctic sea ice cover in response to increasing greenhouse forcing. Here, we investigate the hypothesis that this discrepancy between models and observations occurs due to simulation biases in the sea ice drift velocity. As a control we use the Community Earth System Model (CESM) Large Ensemble, which has 40 realizations of past and future climate change that all undergo Antarctic sea ice retreat during recent decades. We modify CESM to replace the simulated sea ice velocity field with a satellite-derived estimate of the observed sea ice motion, and we simulate 3 realizations of recent climate change. We find that the Antarctic sea

SUBMITTER: Sun S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7887216 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature