A workshop will be held in Cambridge, UK on Wednesday afternoon, 19 August 2015 from 2 pm – 5:30 pm in Churchill College (Storey’s Way, Cambridge CB3 0DS, UK), during the free afternoon of the International Glaciological Society’s International Symposium on Contemporary Ice-Sheet Dynamics.
This meeting will focus on one of the components of ISMIP6: the standalone ice sheet models driven offline by surface climatic forcing from climate models. Past efforts, such as SeaRISE and ice2sea, have indicated that different methods for initialization of ice sheet models (interglacial spinup, assimilation of present day observations, or a combination of both) may play an important role in the spread in projection of ice sheet evolution, and thus may contribute to the uncertainty in projection of sea level. ISMIP6 is therefore designing an experiment that focuses on the initialization of ice sheet models.
The agenda for the meeting is:
- Presentation of the responses to the initialization questionnaire, with a particular focus on datasets being used.
- Discuss the current design of the experiment on initialization, which builds on the feedback received at the ISMIP6 Splinter meeting at EGU (April 2015).
- Identify synergies between ISMIP6 and ISMASS.
The initialization questionnaire for ice sheet models has been send to the ISMIP6 mailing list, but can also be obtained here .
Short summary from the meeting
As it was the first workshop since the official endorsement of ISMIP6 by CMIP6 (6th version of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project), the meeting was a great opportunity to present to the ice sheet modelling community the ISMIP6 and CMIP6 frameworks, including the other MIPs that will take part in CMIP6, the CMIP6 timeline and the Grand Challenges of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP). The first ISMIP6 experiment that is specifically designed for standalone ice sheet model was also presented: iniMIP focuses on the impact of ice sheet model initialization procedure on future ice sheet evolution, and therefore aims to gain an understanding of the uncertainty in sea level projections due to initialization.
end summary
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