CIRFA Seminar: Impact of sea ice transport on Beaufort Gyre liquid freshwater content

Join us for this weeks` CIRFA seminar given by Morven Muilwijk.

WHEN: 19 May 2022, 14:00-15:00.

WHERE: CIRFA corridor or via Teams (Click here to join the meeting)

Bio:
Morven Muilwijk is a postdoctoral researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute working on ice-ocean processes. Morven has a PhD in physical oceanography from the University of Bergen and Bjerknes Center for Climate Research and works with both in-situ observations, climate models, and satellite data. His current research interest is focused on sea ice drift, momentum transfer, and ocean circulation in the central Arctic Ocean. He has been involved in several research expeditions such as MOSAiC and N-ICE2015.

Abstract:

The Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort Gyre (BG) is a wind-driven reservoir of relatively fresh seawater, situated beneath time-mean anticyclonic atmospheric circulation, and is covered by mobile pack ice for most of the year. Liquid freshwater accumulation in and expulsion from this gyre is of critical interest to the climate modelling community, due to its potential to affect the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and due to the importance of freshwater in modulating vertical fluxes of heat, nutrients and carbon in the ocean, and exchanges of heat and moisture with the atmosphere. Here, we investigate the hypothesis that wind-driven sea ice transport into/from the BG region influences the freshwater content of the gyre and its variability. To test this hypothesis, we use the results of a coordinated climate response function (CRF) experiment with four ice-ocean models, in combination with targeted experiments using a regional setup of the MITgcm, in which we rotate the surface wind forcing vectors (thereby changing the ageostrophic component of these winds). We focus particularly on the direction of sea ice drift relative to the wind in these models.