Results from the implementation of the Elastic Viscous Plastic sea ice rheology in HadCM3

Abstract

We present results of an implementation of the Elastic Viscous Plastic (EVP) sea ice dynamics scheme into the Hadley Centre coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model HadCM3. Although the large-scale simulation of sea ice in HadCM3 is quite good with this model, the lack of a full dynamical model leads to errors in the detailed representation of sea ice and limits our confidence in its future predictions. We find that introducing the EVP scheme results in a worse initial simulation of the sea ice. This paper documents various enhancements made to improve the simulation, resulting in a sea ice simulation that is better than the original HadCM3 scheme overall. Importantly, it is more physically based and provides a more solid foundation for future development. We then consider the interannual variability of the sea ice in the new model and demonstrate improvements over the HadCM3 simulation.