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Developments in Simulating and Parameterizing Interactions Between the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic Ice Sheet

  • Glaciology and Climate Change (T Payne, Section Editor)
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Abstract

Recent advances in both ocean modeling and melt parameterization in ice-sheet models point the way toward coupled ice sheet–ocean modeling, which is needed to quantify Antarctic mass loss and the resulting sea-level rise. The latest Antarctic ocean modeling shows that complex interactions between the atmosphere, sea ice, icebergs, bathymetric features, and ocean circulation on many scales determine which water masses reach ice-shelf cavities and how much heat is available to melt ice. Meanwhile, parameterizations of basal melting in standalone ice-sheet models have evolved from simplified, depth-dependent functions to more sophisticated models, accounting for ice-shelf basal topography, and the evolution of the sub-ice-shelf buoyant flow. The focus of recent work has been on better understanding processes or adding new model capabilities, but a broader community effort is needed in validating models against observations and producing melt-rate projections. Given time, community efforts in coupled ice sheet–ocean modeling, already underway, will tackle the considerable challenges involved in building, initializing, constraining, and performing projections with coupled models, leading to reduced uncertainties in Antarctica’s contribution to future sea-level rise.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, which have greatly improved this work.

Funding

XAD is supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, and Office of Biological and Environmental Research under award no. DE-SC0013038. NJ is funded by CNRS and the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the TROIS-AS (ANR-15-CE01-0005-01) project. NJ is involved in Labex OSUG@2020 (ANR10 LABX56) and is an Associate Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. YN is supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program; the NASA Cryosphere program; and the NASA Modeling, Analysis, and Prediction program. POPSICLES simulations presented in Fig. 2 used computing resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC; supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC02-05CH11231).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), P.O. Box 60 12 03, 14412, Potsdam, Germany

    Xylar S. Asay-Davis

  2. Los Alamos National Latoratory, T-3, MS-B216, P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA

    Xylar S. Asay-Davis

  3. Institut des Géosciences de l’Environnement, UGA/CNRS/IRD/G-INP CS 40 700, 38058, Cedex 9, Grenoble, France

    Nicolas C. Jourdain

  4. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 91109, USA

    Yoshihiro Nakayama

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  1. Xylar S. Asay-Davis
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Correspondence to Xylar S. Asay-Davis.

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Asay-Davis, X.S., Jourdain, N.C. & Nakayama, Y. Developments in Simulating and Parameterizing Interactions Between the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Curr Clim Change Rep 3, 316–329 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40641-017-0071-0

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