Affiliation:
1. CMCC Foundation ‐ Euro‐Mediterranean Center on Climate Change Bologna Italy
2. Department of Oceanography University of Cape Town Rondebosch South Africa
3. Marine and Antarctic Research Centre for Innovation and Sustainability (MARIS) University of Cape Town Rondebosch South Africa
Abstract
AbstractState‐of‐the‐art coupled climate models struggle to accurately simulate historical variability and trends of Antarctic sea ice, impacting their reliability for future projections. Increasing horizontal resolution is expected to improve the representation of coupled atmosphere‐ice‐ocean processes at high latitudes. Here, we examine the historical changes in the Antarctic sea ice area and volume in High Resolution Model Intercomparison Project simulations against satellite data sets and ocean reanalyzes to assess the benefits of increased spatial resolution. Our results do not show considerable benefits when horizontal resolutions up to 0.25° in the ocean and 25 km in the atmosphere. Limited improvements are reported in the simulated historical sea ice trends, which are nevertheless model‐dependent, and associated with the use of model components with more complex sea‐ice parameterizations. Given the high computational cost of climate‐scale simulations at high spatial resolution, we advocate prioritizing enhancements in sea‐ice physics and the interactions among model components in coupled climate simulations.
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)