[A-CG36_29PM1] Science in the Arctic Region

★ [ACG36-02] Hindcast simulation of the ice and circulation in the Arctic Ocean for 1978-2012: An application of AO-FVCOM.

*Changsheng CHEN¹, Yu ZHANG¹, Andrey PROSHUTINSKY², Robert BEARDSLEY², Zhigang LAI³, Guoping GAO⁴ (1.School of Marine Science, University of Massachusetts, USA, 2.Department of Physical Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA, 3.School of Marine Sciences, Sun Yet-Sen University, China, 4.International Center for Marine Studies, Shanghai Ocean University, China)

Keywords:Arctic Ocean Modeling, Global-FVCOM, Arctic-FVCOM, Multi-domain nesting, 35 year Arctic simulation, Ice-Current Interaction

A high-resolution, unstructured-grid, finite-volume ice-ocean fully coupled model system, named AO-FVCOM, has been developed for the Arctic Ocean. The governing equations are cast in a generalized terrain-following coordinate system with spatially variable vertical distribution in the vertical and are discretized using flexible non-overlapped triangular grids in the horizontal. This model system includes a) an unstructured grid version of the Los Alamos sea ice model Community Ice CodE (UG-CICE), b) hydrostatic and non-hydrostatic dynamics (NH-FVCOM); c) an unstructured-grid version of the Simulating Wave Nearshore model (SWAN) (named SWAVE), d) 3-D wet/dry point treatment, which can simulate flooding/draining processes in estuaries and wetlands; e) 4-D nudging, OI and Kalman Filters data assimilation algorithms; f) the mass conservative nesting module to integrate multi-domain FVCOM domains; and g) the MPI parallelized visualization tool ViSiT, which allows users to monitor model performance during the simulation and post-process the model output data. An updated version of AO-FVCOM is capable of simulating the ice imbedded in the ocean. AO-FVCOM is a regional model nested with Global-FVCOM. Two version of AO-FVCOM were configured with a finest horizontal resolution of 300 m and 2 km for the Arctic Ocean, respectively. The 2-km version has run for a period of 1978-2012. Without data assimilation, the model was capable of reproducing the seasonal and interannual variability of the ice coverage area in the Arctic and also significant drops of the ice coverage in 2007 and 2012. The 35-year simulation results for the circulation and water transport are being validated with comparison to field measurement data. The influence of the model resolution on water transport through the Canadian Archipelago has been also examined over seasonal and interannual scales, and an example of the water transport through Nares Strait will be presented.