What Processes Drive Southern Ocean Sea Ice Variability and Trends? Insights from the Energy Budget of the Coupled Cryosphere-ocean-atmosphere System

Our primary goal is to understand the processes that drive SO sea ice loss over the observational record and identify which models get the physics right. Although our primary focus is on mechanisms of long-term sea ice loss, the observational record includes rich information at shorter timescales which are better sampled and may elucidate the relevant physics.

Thus, our analysis of mechanisms of sea ice variability spans time scales ranging from days (synoptic) to inter-annual variability to long-term trends to identify model biases in the physics that drive SO sea ice loss events. We divided our work into explorations of 5 major topics 1. Identifying model biases in high frequency sea ice variability in the Southern Ocean 2.