Student Seminar: Amélie Bouchat

Can you improve the modelled sea-ice deformation distributions? - Take action in this seminar in which you are the hero!  

Sea-ice deformations are a key component for modelling high-latitude and global climate. On the one hand, opening of leads forms regions of open water where the energy and momentum fluxes between the atmosphere and the ocean are increased. On the other hand, ridging is an important mechanism for maintaining thick ice floes and therefore a perennial sea-ice cover, which is a major player in the ice-albedo feedback. It is therefore important that sea-ice deformations be represented accurately in sea-ice models. Recent studies have shown that the most commonly used sea-ice deformation scheme in numerical models does not reproduce the observed statistical properties of the deformation distributions. You are a PhD student and your supervisor gives you a mission: find out why we are not able to accurately model the deformation distributions and find a way to improve it. Day and night, many questions appear on your mind... How are deformations represented in sea-ice models? How bad are we doing in reproducing observations of sea-ice deformations? Is it a fundamental problem of our current sea-ice deformation scheme or can we tune it in order to have better agreement with observations? What parameters can we tune and in what way should we change them to have better agreement with observations? Come and get the answers to these questions in this seminar in which you are the hero. Choose what analysis to perform and decide what steps to take next! Will you be able to find out how to improve the modelled sea-ice deformations distributions?