With the emergence of new ice sheet models in the last 5-10 years, a concerted effort has been carried out to try and understand what fundamental differences between different ice sheet models are responsible for the wide divergence in projections of mass balance. This lead to the "Sea-level Response to Ice Sheet Evolution" (SeaRISE) community effort on the US side, and the "Estimating the future contribution of continental ice to sea-level rise (Ice2Sea)" effort on the European side. It was proposed to take advantage of the fact that both efforts are currently at an end, and trying to secure funding for a second phase of benchmarking activities, to try and coordinate both efforts under the CliC umbrella. The goals could be to: 1) minimize the effort between both communities to run both sets of benchmarks; 2) potentially synergize both efforts to target different aspect of benchmarking activities; 3) to facilitate diffusion of benchmarking results within the Climate Community, especially through integration within the Earth Grid System; 4) to better understand how both efforts could be synergized with the CMIP5-6 generation of climate benchmarks, and potentially assimilated/folded into the latter in the longer run.
Presented by Eric Larour, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, at the 9th CliC Scientific Steering Group meeting in Potsdam, Germany 2013.