The Arctic Regional Climate Model Intercomparison Project: Recent Progress (Invited Presentation)

The Arctic Regional Climate Model Intercomparison Project is being conducted under the auspices of the WCRP GEWEX Cloud Systems Studies Programme and the WCRP ACSYS Numerical Experimentation Group. Seven regional models and two global models are participating in the project, and are tasked with simulating the SHEBA year over a common western Arctic domain using specified surface temperatures and common initial and boundary conditions. In addition to the primary atmospheric model experiments, sub-projects are studying the behavior of coupled atmosphere-ice models, evaluating the performance of surface layer parameterizations in the models, and conducting a stand alone assessment of radiative transfer codes using SHEBA data. Progress in all of these aspects of the ARCMIP project will be reported on.