Results from the implementation of the Elastic Viscous Plastic sea ice rheology in HadCM3

• Main Authors: Connolley, W. M., Keen, A. B., Mclaren, A. J.
• Other Authors: British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change (MOHC), United Kingdom Met Office Exeter
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2006
• Subjects: [SDU.OCEAN]Sciences of the Universe [physics]/Ocean; Atmosphere; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00298295; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00298295/document; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00298295/file/os-2-201-2006.pdf

International audience We present results of an implementation of the Elastic Viscous Plastic (EVP) sea ice dynamics scheme into the Hadley Centre coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model HadCM3. Although the large-scale simulation of sea ice in HadCM3 is quite good with this model, the lack of a full dynamical model leads to errors in the detailed representation of sea ice and limits our confidence in its future predictions. We find that introducing the EVP scheme results in a worse initial simulation of the sea ice. This paper documents various enhancements made to improve the simulation, resulting in a sea ice simulation that is better than the original HadCM3 scheme overall. Importantly, it is more physically based and provides a more solid foundation for future development. We then consider the interannual variability of the sea ice in the new model and demonstrate improvements over the HadCM3 simulation.