Collaborative Research: Sea ice extremes: the impact of sea-ice floe-sensitive boundary layer processes on coupled polar extremes and remote teleconnections

Sea ice, which is composed of individual floes whose sizes vary from centimeters to hundreds of kilometers, can melt in a matter of days to weeks. Such rapid loss can significantly affect long-term trends in ocean and sea ice state. However, current models don't accurately show these rapid sea ice changes, one reason being that they do not consider the dynamics of individual sea ice floes and their influence on the ocean and atmosphere. The investigators will develop new methods to represent floe-aware processes and implement them in a leading community Earth system model for future projections. Additionally, the work will examine the effect of sea ice cover loss on extreme cold events over North America. By advancing fundamental understanding of the coupled Arctic-mid-latitude system, this research will strengthen the predictive foundation for weather extremes that impose substantial costs on communities and economic sectors. The work will include the training of graduate students, undergraduate students doing term and summer research projects, and high school summer interns. The investigators will study the large-scale ocean and atmospheric implications of a consistent representation of the floe size and thickness distribution (FSD) and related floe-aware parameterizations of air sea fluxes and ocean mixing. The project will reveal how FSD affected air-sea exchange drives short-term (week-to-month) sea ice loss events, particularly those caused by storm-generated waves. The investigators will also test whether local rapid sea ice loss events triggered by FSD-related processes can initiate large-scale, longer-term Arctic changes. The study will result in an improved understanding and representation of floe-based physics on large-scale ocean and atmospheric processes in the Arctic and improved projections of small- and large-scale abrupt changes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2518542 | Program: 0100CYXXDB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Eli Tziperman | Institution: Harvard University, CAMBRIDGE, MA | Award Amount: $431,327 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2518542 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2518542.html