Abstract
We evaluate the fidelity of the sea ice simulation in the high-resolution ACME V0.1 (featuring POP-CICE4) ensemble of transients initialized with a variety of initial conditions (see McClean et al, poster #03). The Arctic and Antarctic mean state, annual cycle and trends of total sea ice area (TSIA), are examined via comparison with commonly used satellite data sets produced by NASATEAM (NT) and BOOTSTRAP (BT) algorithms. The special focus of our study is the ability of the model to reproduce the observed trends of the Arctic and Antarctic TSIA and its sensitivity to the model initialization. Our preliminary results from the fully coupled high-resolution ACME V0.1 ensemble of transients show an encouraging agreement with the observed trends, in both Arctic and Antarctic, in three members of the ensemble. The later are initialized with restarts from ocean-ice simulation forced with atmospheric re-analysis. This might indicate a new way forward for the initialization of future climate model predictions.