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Sea Ice Thickness Update

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chris_riedel

New member
Hello,
In some recent work I am doing, I added the ability for the user to update sea ice thickness, via some dataset, like one would update sea ice concentration during integration. I built in a namelist flag that the user turns on if they want to update sea ice thickness (default is false). Currently, since most global modeling centers do not provide sea ice thickness, I had to add the sea ice thickness data via a python script to an already created surface update file. The python script script does both interpolation of data to the MPAS mesh and adding it to the update surface file. I was curious if this is something you would want to add to a MPAS release. Currently, the sea ice thickness code is added to MPASv6.1.

Chris Riedel
 
Thanks very much for inquiring about this! Are there global sea ice thickness datasets that are readily available? If so, then this might be worth adding to a future release; otherwise, perhaps a capability with no available input data might be of less general interest.

Either way, we have been thinking recently on ways that we could identify which fields in the model were last read from an input stream. This functionality might help in implementing, e.g., the updates of additional fields: we could check in the model which fields were actually read from the surface update stream into temporary variables, and to then update fields used in the integration accordingly, without the need to add ad hoc namelist options.
 
If I'm not mistaken, it's possible to find reliable sea ice thickness data from the NSIDC, but a question remains: do they have data from all over the world, or from some regions only?
 
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