Sea Ice in the NCEP Climate Forecast System

Sea ice is known to play a significant role in the global climate system. For a weather or climate forecast system (CFS), it is important that the realistic distribution of sea ice is represented. Sea ice prediction is challenging; sea ice can form or melt, it can move with wind and/or ocean current; sea ice interacts with both the air above and ocean underneath, it influences by, and has impact on the air and ocean conditions. NCEP has developed coupled CFS (version 2, CFSv2) and also carried out CFS reanalysis (CFSR), which includes a coupled model with the NCEP global forecast system, a land model, an ocean model (GFDL MOM4), and a sea ice model. In this work, we present the NCEP coupled model, the CFSv2 sea ice component that includes a dynamic thermodynamic sea ice model and a simple “assimilation” scheme, how sea ice has been assimilated in CFSR, the characteristics of the sea ice from CFSR and CFSv2, and the improvements of sea ice needed for future CFS (version 3), part of the Unified Global Coupled System, which is being developed.