Short-term predictability of Arctic climate

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The PI's overarching goal is to investigate short-term Arctic climate predictability and to improve understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to short-term Arctic climate variability. Coupled interactions involving sea ice are her chief focus. New ocean and sea ice state estimates that assimilate both ocean and sea ice observations make it possible for the first time to properly initialize fully coupled climate models to investigate short-term Arctic climate forecasts. A few climate models, including the Community Climate System Model, appear capable of high quality simulations of Arctic climate and should be good candidates for such an activity: She proposes to validate predictability of short-term Arctic climate forecasts using an ensemble forecast with the new CCSM4. She will investigate methods to produce Arctic seasonal to interannual forecasts. She will produce short-term probability forecasts of the Arctic sea ice and climate system by the end of the project. Since many of the same sea ice physical processes of fundamental importance for climate change time scales are also key to short-term forecasts, she will use understanding gained about the model from short-term predictions, which are more easily verifiable, to interpret projections of future greenhouse warming climate change.