Arctic Master Works Webinar – Environmental

This webinar and panel session is part of the Arctic Master Works Webinar Series and highlights the impact of advanced computing in environmental research.

The Arctic is warming at a rate of almost twice the global average. This is contributing to rising sea levels, changes in precipitation patterns, increasing severe weather events, and significant changes in sea ice extent. In this webinar and panel session, two expert speakers will discuss the state of sea ice modeling and atmospheric modeling as well as challenges for the future.

Registration

Registration TBA

Speakers and Abstracts

Elizabeth Hunke

Elizabeth Hunke is a scientist in the T-3 Fluid Dynamics and Solid Mechanics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Her educational background includes B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics, a discipline she chose for the flexibility it provides. She studied hurricanes initially, but her specialty has since become sea ice and polar climate. Although she spends most of her time working in front of a computer in New Mexico's high desert Hunke has enjoyed sea ice and oceanographic field experience in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica. She has served as a U.S. delegate to the International Arctic Science Committee, was a Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge UK, and received LANL's Fellows' Prize for Leadership. Hunke leads the CICE Consortium, an international group of institutions jointly maintaining and developing the CICE sea ice model in the public domain for the research and operational communities; and she is LANL's program manager for the Department of Energy's Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences programs.

Modeling Sea Ice for Climate Research and Short-Term Forecasting

The CICE sea ice model is used extensively by climate and Earth system research groups, and also by operational centers for applications such as numerical weather prediction and guidance for military operations. This presentation introduces the physics represented by large-scale sea-ice models, discusses some of the challenges in applying sea-ice modeling tools developed for research purposes for operational forecasting on short time scales, and highlights promising new directions in sea-ice modeling. The thread running through this discussion relates to the complexity needed to meet common yet distinct sea ice modeling objectives among different communities.

Halldór Björnsson

Halldór Björnsson heads the atmospheric research group at the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO). He obtained a Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at McGill in 1997 and has worked on modeling of the Atmosphere, Ocean and Sea Ice for many years, first at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton but the since the turn of the century in Iceland at IMO. He has also headed the Climate Change Impact Assessment for Iceland which combines the output of dozens of scientists from many different fields and furthermore done studies on volcanic clouds, wind energy and various other problems that he never planned to take part in. He has taken part in many different scientific project, related to modeling or measurements, and also in organizational committees such as the International Arctic Science Committee, the ECWMF technical advisory committee and steering committees related to the Hirlam and Harmonie weather forecasting models.

Modeling of Atmosphere, Ocean for Forecasting Purposes in the Arctic

The IMO does weather forecasting for a domain that extends from south of Iceland to the North Pole. The model that is most used for this is the Harmonie/Arome model developed by a consortium lead by MeteoFrance. With the Danish Meteorological Institute, this model is used to calculate a forecast for a domain encompassing Iceland and Greenland. Another instance of the same model is then run for a smaller domain that only encompasses Iceland. These models employ resolution ranging from 2.7 km to 750 m, depending on the target variables and forecast use, and model development projects that aim to improve the forecast or provide new products is a key activity. Among such projects is the Copernicus Arctic Reanalysis (CARRA) that used the Harmonie setup for Iceland and Greenland to make a climate reanalysis from 1998 to 2019, providing essential climate variables and advancing modeling of snow and physiography as well as data assimilation. The IMO is also running the Delft3D storm surge model for coastal waters, using output from the Harmonie model to drive calculation of sea surface variations using a model domain with variable resolution that goes down to 150 m at its fines. This talk will focus on the progress made in modeling in recent years and also how the customer demands may drive development into unexpected directions.

Webinar Series Organizing Committee

• Morris Riedel, associate professor, University of Iceland
• David Martin, Industry Partnerships and Outreach manager, Argonne National Laboratory
• Henning Úlfarsson, assistant professor, Reykjavik University
• Steve Hammond, senior research advisor, National Renewable Energy Laboratory