Surface energy budget and its impact on the sea ice evolution in the Barents Sea

Sea ice is a critical interface layer between the atmosphere and the ocean. It is a major component of the polar ecosystem, an essential component of the earth climate system, and an amplifier of global climate change. Sea ice plays an important role in the global climate system. Its thermodynamical processes increase or decrease the sea ice thickness through phase changes, controlled by the energy budgets at the ice surface and at the ice bottom. Barents-2.5 is an operational ocean and sea ice forecast model for short-term forecasting at met.no. Operational forecasts are performed daily for sea ice concentration, sea surface temperature, and ocean currents in the Barents Sea, coastal waters around Svalbard and off northern Norway. The model is based on ROMS (the Regional Ocean Modeling System) version 3.7 (Shchepetkin and McWilliams, 2005) and CICE version 5.1 (Hunke et al., 2017). The surface energy budget in the Barenets-2.5 model is elucidated and its impact on the sea ice evolution is evaluated in this study.