ABSTRACT

The impacts of changing sea ice are being felt today on the shores of northern Alaska, including in Barrow, Alaska, where much of the local residents' everyday lives revolve around sea ice and its conditions. This grant will hold a course in Barrow to bring together researchers who model sea ice with those who study it in the field. It will entrain researchers at different stages of their careers, in order to build interdisciplinary teams. Participants in the course will receive an accelerated program on sea ice observations and models and meet colleagues for future collaborative interdisciplinary activities. The course will help direct future sea ice research by integrating observational and modeling efforts. The group will also develop a white paper on future priorities and activities in arctic system science as it relates to sea ice; and hold a session at a major meeting focused on building bridges between the sea ice observing and modeling communities.

The team will also engage with the local Barrow community in outreach activities that will include community presentations on models, predictive capabilities, and the future outlook for sea ice. Barrow also provides an excellent opportunity for the scientists to listen and learn from local residents who have a tremendous understanding of sea ice, of the ongoing changes, and of the impact of those changes.

The Arctic has undergone dramatic change and numerical models project this to continue for the foreseeable future. Perhaps the most striking change is the decline in sea ice cover and the possibility of ice-free summers within this century. Understanding the mechanisms behind sea ice loss and its consequences for the larger Arctic and global systems is of critical importance if we are to anticipate and plan for the future. One impediment to progress in this area is a disconnect between the observational and modeling communities. While there is a strong group of researchers observing arctic sea ice and another strong group modeling it, these two groups have remained largely distinct. This grant will support a field course for a one-week introduction to sea ice observations and models based in Barrow, Alaska. Barrow affords easy access to a range of sea ice conditions, excellent logistics, and is a community impacted by the changes in arctic sea ice. The course will include a mix of modelers and observers, drawing researchers from different career stages. Each day there will be field observations on the shorefast sea ice, as well as presentations about the treatment of sea ice in large-scale models and practical sessions to provide hands-on experience with running models and analyzing model output. There will be discussions of remote sensing tools and products. Additional time will be targeted for discussions about future directions of sea ice research and how to better integrate modeling and observations.

There is a tremendous opportunity to improve our ability to observe and understand the ongoing changes in the arctic sea ice cover, and to project future changes through a deeper connection between observations and models. The course proposed here will remedy some of the knowledge gaps within the sea ice research community. Observers will gain new insight on the issues regarding the treatment of sea ice in large-scale models, improving their ability to formulate observation strategies and networks. Modelers will gain new appreciation for the heterogeneous complexity of sea ice and its importance for coupled interactions. This will result in better-informed methods to address questions of understanding arctic change and improved integration and synthetic approaches to studying sea ice and its role in the arctic system.

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