Call for Abstracts: Session on Cryosphere, Atmosphere and Climate at the 26th IUGG General Assembly

-IACS Symposium C15 is a CliC sponsored activity

IACS Symposium C15: Cryosphere, Atmosphere and Climate: Evaluation of the Cryosphere in CMIP5 Models will be convened at the 26th IUGG General Assembly to be held from June 22 to July 2, 2015, in Prague, Czech Republic.

Convener: Alexandra Jahn (Boulder, USA)
Co-conveners: Gerhard Krinner (Grenoble, France) and François Massonnet (Louvain, Belgium)

The Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) provides a large multi-model ensemble of historical simulations, idealized experiments, and future projections that were used extensively in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report. Although some initial evaluation of the ability of the CMIP5 models to simulate aspects of the cryosphere was undertaken in Chapter 9 of the IPCC report, more in-depth evaluation remains to be done. This symposium invites contributions in which cryosphere components (sea-ice, snow, ice sheets, permafrost, etc.) in CMIP5 models are evaluated by comparison to a range of in-situ and remotely-sensed data. Novel evaluation approaches, in which important physical processes are identified and probed, are particularly welcome, as are contributions to understanding the link between model quality (as evaluated by comparison to historical observations) and confidence in model predictions on seasonal to interannual time scales, and in model projections of longer-term future climate. Careful evaluation of model biases and shortcomings also helps guide ongoing model development through the identification of processes or feedbacks that are not well represented. Therefore, this symposium also invites contributions in which model evaluation is applied to understanding shortcomings in the representation of cryospheric.

We invite you to submit an abstract for this session and attend it! Please see the abstract submission guidelines here.