Special ClimaTea Lecture

Date: 

Thursday, November 19, 2015, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Geology Museum 418
"The role of convection in sea ice" by David Rees Jones (University of Oxford)

Abstract:
Sea ice is a thin, dynamic interface between the atmosphere and ocean. We review the role of sea ice in the climate system, and discuss how we model sea ice in large-scale climate models. The growth of sea ice is a largely one-dimensional, thermodynamic process that involves the transport of heat and salt within the sea ice. Sea ice is a permeable medium, and convective fluid flow plays a central role in the transport of salt. This transport is not directly represented in previous generations of climate models, and we discuss new modelling efforts that determine the convective transport dynamically. Our new parameterization improves the predictive power and responsiveness of climate models in terms of surface buoyancy fluxes to the polar oceans and sea-ice growth.