Response of high resolution coupled sea ice/ocean model to the assimilation of ice motion fields derived from microwave satellite imagery

Abstract

Motivated by abundant sources of data and the need to improve weather prediction capabilities, data assimilation has a long history in atmospheric modeling. Data assimilation applied to sea-ice models, on the other hand, is in its infancy. Most of the investigations over the past twenty years falls into one of three categories: (1) the statistical interpolation of data into gridded fields (Thorndike and Colony, 1983), (2) advanced assimilation methods applied to simplified “box” style sea-ice models (Thomas and Rothrock, 1989), and (3) the non-statistical assimilation of ice data (Maslanik and Maybee, 1994). While the work of Maslanik and Maybee comes closest, no one had tackled the problem of statistically assimilating data into a full-featured sea-ice model. This situation changed with the work of Meier et al. (2000). They assimilated ice motions derived from passive microwave imagery into a fully dynamic-thermodynamic sea-ice model using optimal interpolation, a statistical interpolation technique. Their success motivated this project.