This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Ice sheets are fundamental components of the Earth system. Antarctica and Greenland, the two ice sheets currently on Earth, don't just affect their own regions: What happens on these vast masses of land ice influences weather, climate, society and the environment around the planet.
Ice sheets are the largest drivers of global sea-level change on centennial and longer timescales, and they play a fundamental role in regulating incoming solar radiation and oceanic and atmospheric circulation. ACCESS-NRI has released four key components of the Ice Sheet and Sea-level System Model (ISSM) workflow to the Australian research community, marking the first step toward integrating a dynamic ice-sheet model into the ACCESS climate suite. "This is the first attempt at integrating a dynamic ice sheet model into the ACCESS climate suite.
Until now, researchers have used a static proxy to approximate the impact of ice sheets, and work has typically focused on individual regions rather than all of Antarctica. Now with ISSM we'll be able to do that," said Dr. Mike Tetley, team lead of the Ice Sheet Modeling team at ACCESS-NRI, Australia's climate simulator.
A dynamic ice sheet model captures the two-way interaction between ice, ocean and atmosphere. Ice sheets contribute freshwater to the oceans, which affects temperature, salinity and circulation, while the reflective surface of the ice also influences the atmosphere. In turn, changes in the ocean and atmosphere feed back into ice sheet evolution.
"If we want to understand how the climate might change over the coming centuries, and the impact of these changes on Earth systems, we need to accurately model the interactions between the ice sheets and the ocean and atmosphere. Ice sheet modeling is a major area of research at Monash University, the University of Tasmania (UTAS) and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) and is also used by ocean modelers around the country," said Professor Nerilie Abram, chief scientist at AAD. Developed in close consultation between ACCESS-NRI and the cryospheric research community, this end-to-end workflow, from creating a model to getting results, includes four new components: "These releases allow researchers to start using the ISSM model workflow straight away.
Because it runs on Australian infrastructure like the supercomputer Gadi at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), the Australian modeling community can run the same model and data sets on the same system, which simplifies the whole process, as the code does a lot of the work for them. Our deployment of ISSM is optimized for our Australian systems, so it makes running and processing ISSM simpler and more accessible to the community," said Dr. Felicity McCormack, co-developer of the model and chief investigator on the ARC Special Research Initiative Securing Antarctica's Environmental Future (SAEF), Monash University.
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