ISMASS Workshop on the Marine Ice Sheet and Ice Shelf‐Ocean Model Intercomparison Projects

1-ISMASSThe SCAR/IASC/CliC Ice Sheet and Sea Level Mass Balance (ISMASS) group will hold a workshop in Cambridge, UK on Sunday afternoon, 16 August 2015, right before the International Glaciological Society’s International Symposium on Contemporary Ice-Sheet Dynamics: ocean interaction, meltwater and non-linear effectsnternational Symposium on Contemporary Ice-Sheet Dynamics: ocean interaction, meltwater and non-linear effects. The precise location and time will be announced soon.

Ice‐ocean interactions are considered to lie at the basis of current and future ice mass loss of the Antarctic ice sheet. One of the feedback mechanisms that can be generated through such ice‐ocean interaction is the so‐called marine ice sheet instability, which generates at present the most important uncertainty for the projections of sea level in the context of global warming.

A set of 3 types of idealized intercomparison experiments for studying marine ice sheet processes in ice‐sheet, ocean and coupled models have been developed over the past year. MISMIP+ was announced at EGU 2014 and presented at AGU 2014. The remaining experiments (ISOMIP+ and MISOMIP1) were conceived of at WCRP Climate and Cryosphere workshop at NYU Abu Dhabi in October 2014. All three experiments were presented at the MISOMIP Splinter meeting at EGU (April 2015) by Xylar Asay‐Davis and Stephen Cornford and will be discussed again at this meeting in more detail.

For more information, please visit the workshop webpage: http://www.climate-cryosphere.org/activities/groups/ismass/meetings/mismips-cambridge

ISMASS (Ice sheet mass balance and sea level) is a joint expert group of SCAR, IASC and CliC