Articles | Volume 12, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-365-2018
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-365-2018
Research article
 | 
29 Jan 2018
Research article |  | 29 Jan 2018

Consistent biases in Antarctic sea ice concentration simulated by climate models

Lettie A. Roach, Samuel M. Dean, and James A. Renwick

Data sets

ASI Algorithm SSMI-SSMIS sea ice concentration data L. Kaleschke, F. Girard-Ardhuin, G. Spreen, A. Beitsch, and S. Kern http://icdc.cen.uni-hamburg.de/1/daten/cryosphere/seaiceconcentration-asi-ssmi.html

NOAA/NSIDC Climate Data Record of Passive Microwave Sea Ice Concentration, Version 3 W. Meier, F. Fetterer, M. Savoie, S. Mallory, R. Duerr, and J. Stroeve https://doi.org/10.7265/N59P2ZTG

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Short summary
This paper evaluates Antarctic sea ice simulated by global climate models against satellite observations. We find biases in high-concentration and low-concentration sea ice that are consistent across the population of 40 models, in spite of the differences in physics between different models. Targeted model experiments show that biases in low-concentration sea ice can be significantly reduced by enhanced lateral melt, a result that may be valuable for sea ice model development.