Fragmentation and melting of the seasonal sea ice cover

Recent years have seen a rapid reduction in the summer extent of Arctic sea ice, renewing interest in the physical processes responsible for summer sea ice retreat. The sea ice cover comprises a mosaic of sea ice floes that may be frozen together in winter or separated in summer. Sea ice climate models treat the floe size as a constant whereas observations show there to be a distribution of floe sizes, with significant spatial and temporal variability, especially in the seasonal and marginal ice zones at the sea ice edge. This PhD project will examine the impact of the observed heterogeneity in floe size on the summer melt and retreat of sea ice. The student will develop a new model of the floe size distribution, including breakup and freezing together of floes, include this into a sea ice climate model, and examine the impact of the new physics on Arctic sea ice retreat in the seasonal and marginal ice zones.

This PhD project is supervised by Prof Danny Feltham, Dr. Harold Heorton, and Dr. David Schroeder at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, in collaboration with Dr. Jeff Ridley at the Met Office Hadley Centre and Dr. Yevgeny Aksenov at the National Oceanography Centre.

Full project description is available at http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/pg-research/PhD_project_sea_ice_fragmentation_2016.pdf