Author(s): Jun Ono; Liyanarachchi Waruna Arampath De Silva; Hajime Yamaguchi
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Abstract: Recently, the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and Northwest Passage (NWP) have been opened to a greater extent due to sea-ice retreat in summer Arctic Ocean. This increases the possibility for the use of the NSR and NWP as a newArctic sea route. Thus, a precise prediction system is vital for safe ship navigation in the NSR and NWP. To date, a lot of numerical studies have been carried out to forecast the overall Arctic sea ice for the climate change. Withregards to the safe ship navigation, however, the accuracy and resolution in their model are still questionable. Our goal is to predict the ice edge up to 5 days ahead within an error of 10 km, using high-resolution (about 2.5 km) model. To date, an ice-ocean coupled model of the Arctic Ocean has been developed on the basis of the model. The atmospheric forcing components are given by the ERA-Interim with 6-hourly interval. After spinup of 10 years with the forcing data in 2000, the model was integrated from 2001 to 2013. The model reproduces the seasonal andinterannual variations in the sea-ice extent and sea-ice drift velocity to some extent. However, the model showed relatively poor reproducibility on the simulation of the sea-ice thickness. As a first step toward the prediction of sea ice for the NSR and NWP, we conducted a series of hindcast and forecast simulations using the high-resolutionmodel with simple data assimilation, and then compared with the satellite-induced sea ice.
Year: 2014