Invited Speaker: Dirk Notz (MPI-M) + Tony Payne (University of Bristol)

The Earth's cryosphere (ice-sheets, sea-ice, permafrost, snow) plays an important role in the energy balance, and in the hydrological and biogeochemical cycles of the climate system. The main challenges of understanding the current evolution of the cryosphere, as well as predicting its future, are matched by the long standing challenge in understanding, on much longer time-scales, the past glacial interglacial cycles. As fast components of the cryosphere, sea-ice and snow have been included in climate models for a long time, while until recently, only Earth system models of intermediate complexity, tackling climate changes on millennial or longer time-scales, included representations of the ice-sheets. The large potential impact of changes in ice sheets (e.g. sea level rise) and permafrost (e.g. carbon release) and the present fast evolution of these components has prompted developments of their representation in high-resolution Earth System models. This session invites papers focusing on the re presentation of the cryosphere in Earth system models, as well as on the study of their behaviour and feedbacks in past, present and future climates.