Back to opportunities | Category Index
These are the intended use-case/justification for one or multiple variable groups. Opportunities are linked to relevant experiment groups. Identifying opportunities helps to provide a structure to map variables against requirements. Each opportunity description will convey why this combination of variables and experiments is important and how they contribute to impact.
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| description | The output for this opportunity will allow the historical and future behaviour of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to simulated and assessed. The mass loss from these ice sheets is a key contributor to future sea level rise, and their freshwater input to the climate system provides an important forcing for ocean circulation and carbon and heat uptake. Ice sheets are also a key potential tipping element in the Earth System, and characterising this aspect of their future evolution may have huge societal impact. This Opportunity comes from the ice sheet modelling community via ISMIP7 but other MIPs concerned with ice sheet behaviour, primarily TIPMIP and MISOMIP may use these variables. It requests climate model variables that characterise the boundaries of ice sheet regions from the atmosphere, land and ocean domains, as well as ice sheet state variables themselves. |
| desirable_ensemble_size | 1000 |
| expected_impacts | The data requested from the Historical and Scenario simulations will primarily be used to create boundary conditions for a large ensemble of standalone Ice Sheet Model (ISMs) simulations under the auspices of ISMIP7, although some ESMs in CMIP7 may conduct these simulations with ice sheet components coupled in as well. This combination output from ESM and ISM simulations will allow the future contribution of the icesheets to sea level rise to be projected and the model and scenario uncertainty of those projections to be characterised. In addition to ISMIP7, other MIPs concerned with ice sheet behaviour, primarily TIPMIP and MISOMIP may use these variables. Quantifying future sea level rise contributes to CMIP and WCRP efforts on the Long-term response of the climate system, safe landing climates and tipping points. |
| justification_of_resources | Atmosphere and land domain variables requested are primarily surface fields at frequencies from subdaily to monthly. A few full-depth ocean state variables are requested at monthly frequency. These will be assessed to inform potential subselection of the most appropriate climate models to use to generate mass balance boundary conditions for a large ensemble of downstream ice sheet model simulations. Earth System models that contain ice sheets are also requested to provide ice sheet state variables to characterise the ice sheet behaviour and impact on sea level. |
| lead_theme | Land & Land-Ice |
| minimum_ensemble_size | 1 |
| name | Ice sheet mass loss, contributions to sea level rise and freshwater flux input to the climate system |
| opportunity_id | 39 |
| technical_notes | Regarding the scenario extensions, we have the following priorities: Tier 1 = High and Very low with limited overshoot experiments [scen7-hc-ext/esm-scen7-hc-ext and scen7-vlloc-ext/esm-scen7-vlloc-ext], Tier 2 = High with overshoot, Medium-low, and Medium experiments [scen7-hc-ext-os/esm-scen7-hc-ext-os, scen7-mlc-ext/esm-scen7-mlc-ext, and scen7-mc-ext/esm-scen7-mc-ext]. We also request for groups to do longer than the minimum (2150) years for the scenario extensions, ideally a minimum date of 2400 for H-ext-OS and 2300 for the others to enable our Opportunity. |
| data_request_themes | Land & Land-Ice |
| experiment_groups | picontrol, ismip7-scenario-extensions, scenarios, historical |
| mips | PMIP, ISMIP7, TIPMIP, MISOMIP2, SOFIAMIP |
| time_subsets | 80ac3156-a698-11ef-914a-613c0433d878 |
| variable_groups | ocean_grid_low_priority, baseline_fixed, baseline_monthly, landice_antarctica_allfreq, landice_global_allfreq, landice_greenland_allfreq, ocean_grid |