The Role of Melt Ponds in Ice-Albedo Feedback

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Funds are provided for a modeling study focused on processes that control melt pond evolution on sea ice. The general objective is to understand the physical processes that generate melt pond growth through lateral and bottom melting and evaluate the potential role of pond albedo feedback mechanisms. The main hypothesis to be tested is that melt pond growth involves a feedback process whereby increased pond depth and pond size leads to a decrease in pond albedo and greater solar absorption by the pond.The proposed approach is to simulate an idealized melt pond using a coupled pond/ice model based on large-eddy simulation (LES) and a three-dimensional ice model. Predicted melt pond characteristics, such as the ratio of the side to bottom melt and vertical heat flux, will be tabulated and used to construct a simplified melt pond model based on a bulk thermodynamic energy budget. Ultimately, the simplified pond model will be coupled with a hydrological sea ice melt water model for use as a parameterization of summer melting sea ice.Our present inability to model the summer evolution of melt ponds on sea ice constitutes a significant shortcoming of climate models. It is anticipated that the results of this study will be rapidly transitioned into improvements of these climate models.