On the observational needs for climate models in polar regions

• Main Author: Jennifer E. Kay (ncar
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.261.1218; http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/working_groups/Polar/PCWG_workingdoc_obs4models_July22012.docx.pdf

Observations are essential for motivating and establishing improvement in the representation of polar processes within climate models. We believe that explicitly documenting the current methods used to develop and evaluate climate models with observations will help inform and improve collaborations between the observational and climate modeling communities. As such, this document describes the current strategy of the Polar Climate Working Group (PCWG) to evaluate polar processes within Community Earth System Model (CESM) using observations. This document follows a more general short paper by F. Massonnet and A. Jahn on the observational needs for sea ice models (Massonnet and Jahn, 2012). The information presented here reflects our collective experience working on the CESM project, but is incomplete. At present, the document focused mainly on atmospheric, sea ice, and surface oceanic processes. In the future, we hope to expand the document to include land surface, deep ocean, and BGC observations and we are looking for volunteers to help inform us of current activities within CESM. Suggestions on the material included here are very welcome, especially as they relate to the proper use of available observations, to establishing critical needs for new observations, and