Any references on sea ice production validation for the Ross Sea would be incredibly valuable.I’d greatly appreciate any pointers! @willrhobbs@aekiss@pxh581
@jingweiau one of the things you might want to look at is the positive sea ice trend in the Ross Sea (at least up to the 2016 inflexion point when the observed trends reversed).
The western Ross Sea was the strongest contributor to observed positive trends up to 2015 and the only sector with a significant trend in all seasons, but coupled models failed to capture that. Even ocean-sea ice models with reanalysis ofrings (like OM2) generally under-simulate the observed trend.
There’s a lot of literature on this and a number of different (but possibly complementary theories) on what happened. It migt be worth taking a dove into some of that literature and also having a look at the trends for that sector in OM2.
As for validating sea ice production, that’s a fairly high-order variable that’s beyond direct observation. For the polynya itself there’s the Tamura dataset which we’ve already pointed you to, but that’s it really. There are some sea ice motion satellite retrievals you could play with, to get a sea ice concentration budget (like Holland & Kwok); again @anton has oulined some of the biases/issues