In recent decades, the climate in the polar regions has undergone dramatic changes. Quantifying the individual contributions of atmosphere, ice and ocean to the observed changes is challenging, since not all processes in each component are fully understood or not yet captured by models. In addition, there are strong feedback mechanism between ice, ocean and atmosphere which limits any attempt to understand the system by studying individual components separately. This session focuses on coupled models to better understand the key processes that control the ice-ocean-atmosphere system and thereby improve future projections of climate change.

The main objective of this session is to address the challenges to include the land ice dynamics in the Earth System Models. The submitted abstracts should work on coupled models of at least two of the following: atmosphere, land ice, ocean. Studies can also deal with inclusion of additional components to the coupling scheme, like sub-glacial hydrology, biochemistry, firn, calving and ice bergs. We encourage studies addressing any aspect – no matter physical or technical - of coupling. Among others, topics of submitted abstracts could be interface development and maintenance, coupling workflows, aspects of variable exchange (like mass and energy conservation, interpolation), coupled simulation results in the Arctic or Antarctic and comparisons of online- and offline-coupled models.

This session is submitted as a PICO session giving each scientist the opportunity to verbally present their main results briefly followed by more detailed explanations and discussions using interactive screens.