Korean International Sea Ice Modelling Workshop

By Alex Fraser (Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, AAPP)

Alex Fraser (AAPP) and Luke Bennetts (University of Adelaide) were invited to give presentations at the Korean International Sea Ice Modelling Workshop, from 24-26 Oct, in Seoul. Hosted by the Korean Polar Research Institute, KOPRI, and organised by Clare Eayrs, Won Sang Lee and Jean-François Lemieux, this workshop aimed to build on international collaboration in sea ice modeling, and build capability within the Korean program. International invited speakers also included Martin Vancoppenolle, François Massonet, Ed Blockley, Anton Korosov, Xianwei Wang, Lorenzo Zampieri and Shiming Xu. A follow-up meeting is to be held in November 2024 in Italy – this is being organised in part by Jean-François Lemieux.

Photo: L-R: Workshop organisers Clare Eayrs, Jean-Francois Lemieux and Won Sang Lee.

Some takeaways from the meeting (noted by Alex):

• Modeling fast ice is quickly becoming a hot topic – featuring in around half the keynote presentations
• There was a lot of discussion on the use of AI/machine learning to supplement and extend dynamical models

• • This even includes the prospect of replacing some components of dynamical models with ML-based modules (and saving big on compute time in the process)
  • e.g., ECMWF’s dynamical long-term forecast is now outperformed by its AI-based counterpart “AIFS” – and many other examples of ML-based models outperforming dynamical models.

• Although models themselves are still quite diverse (there were representatives there from CICE, SI3, neXtSIM and others), there is some concern in the community that atmospheric forcing is converging toward ERA5 by all groups – thereby increasing our dependence on one forcing dataset and reducing diversity.