Hi everyone,
I’m seeking available sea ice production observation/reanalysis dataset, for a comparison with ACCESS-OM2 model outputs. I’m focusing on the period from 2000-2020 in the Ross Sea area.
I’ve come across literatures suggesting the calculation of sea ice production using heat flux. So it would be also helpful if someone familiar with this method.
Thanks.
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Hi Jingwei
The sea-ice history output from access-om2 should include fields for thermal and dynamic “tendency” which separate the change in sea-ice concentration/volume into thermal and dynamic components. “Tendency” is just used to mean the rate of change.
There is a sparsity of observations to compare this to. To get direct estimates measurements of heat flux would rely on under-ice temperature measurements etc, of which there are very few. The closest thing I can think of is :
In this (Holland and Kimura) paper, they calculated the dynamic tendency term by comparing sea-ice concentration and sea-ice motion remote sensing products. And then the thermal tendency is the residual ( i.e. difference between the dynamic tendency and total change in sea ice concentration). Other papers have done the same calculations using similar datasets (e.g. Southern Ocean sea ice concentration budgets of five ocean-sea ice reanalyses | Climate Dynamics) but i’m not sure there is high confidence in the results due to a lack of direct observations to compare the results to and uncertainty in the sea-ice motion products (especially for convergence).
Hopefully that helps, @willrhobbs is much more knowledgeable on this stuff than I am.
Anton
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Hi Jingwei
I don’t have much to add to what @anton wrote regarding sea ice concentration budgets (and he’s correct in that they seem to underestimate the convergence/dynamic term).
When you mention sea ice production derived from heatfluxes, are you just looking at the Ross polynya? If so, there is a dataset of polynya productivity from Takeshi Tamura which may have been updated. If you’re looking at pack ice though, you’re out of luck.
Possibly better to look at Winter Water depth/salinity as a proxy of sea ice production.
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Hi @anton and @willrhobbs ,
Thanks for your response and for sharing the information regarding sea ice concentration budgets. I’ll certainly look into Takeshi Tamura’s paper for the sea ice production in the Ross polynya.
Thanks again
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