Response of high resolution coupled sea ice/ocean model to the assimilation of ice motion fields derived from microwave satellite imagery

• Main Author: Stark, Donald
• Other Authors: Oceanography
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2003
• Subjects: Meier; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10945/46055

Motivated by abundant sources of data and the need to improve weather prediction capabilities, data assimilation has a long history in atmospheric modeling. Data assimilation applied to sea-ice models, on the other hand, is in its infancy. Most of the investigations over the past twenty years falls into one of three categories: (1) the statistical interpolation of data into gridded fields (Thorndike and Colony, 1983), (2) advanced assimilation methods applied to simplified “box” style sea-ice models (Thomas and Rothrock, 1989), and (3) the non-statistical assimilation of ice data (Maslanik and Maybee, 1994). While the work of Maslanik and Maybee comes closest, no one had tackled the problem of statistically assimilating data into a full-featured sea-ice model. This situation changed with the work of Meier et al. (2000). They assimilated ice motions derived from passive microwave imagery into a fully dynamic-thermodynamic sea-ice model using optimal interpolation, a statistical interpolation technique. Their success motivated this project.