Improving the WRF model's simulation over sea ice surface through coupling with a complex thermodynamic sea ice model

Abstract

Abstract. Sea ice plays an important role in the air–ice–ocean interaction, but it is often represented simply in many regional atmospheric models. The Noah sea ice model, which has been widely used in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, exhibits cold bias in simulating the Arctic sea ice temperature when validated against the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA) in situ observations. According to sensitivity tests, this bias is attributed not only to the simulation of snow depth and turbulent fluxes but also to the heat conduction within snow and ice. Compared with the Noah sea ice model, the high-resolution thermodynamic snow and ice model (HIGHTSI) has smaller bias in simulating the sea ice temperature. HIGHTSI is further coupled with the WRF model to evaluate the possible added value from better resolving the heat transport and solar penetration in sea ice from a complex thermodynamic sea ice model. The cold bias in simulating the surface temperature over sea ice in winter by the original Polar WRF is reduced when HIGHTSI rather than Noah is coupled with the WRF model, and this also leads to a better representation of surface upward longwave radiation and 2 m air temperature. A discussion on the impact of specifying sea ice thickness in the WRF model is presented. Consistent with previous research, prescribing the sea ice thickness with observational information would result in the best simulation among the available methods. If no observational information is available, using an empirical method based on the relationship between sea ice concentration and sea ice thickness could mimic the large-scale spatial feature of sea ice thickness. The potential application of a thermodynamic sea ice model in predicting the change in sea ice thickness in a RCM is limited by the lack of sea ice dynamic processes in the model and the coarse assumption on the initial value of sea ice thickness.