LANL: 12 9 2008

On August 18-20th, the COSIM group at Los Alamos National Laboratory held a workshop on development of a U.S. Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM), which will ultimately be a component of the U.S. Community Climate System Model (CCSM). There were approximately 35 attendees from ~20 different universities, national labs and research centers.

Workshop goals

A number of recent national and international workshops and meetings have focused on identifying how next generation ice sheet models need to be improved in order to accurately capture recent, dramatic, ice sheet behaviors. The focus of this workshop was more towards (1) prioritizing model improvements that are necessary for improved sea-level rise forecasts in the next 2-5 years, (2) identifying specific tasks towards making those improvements, and (3) assigning these tasks to individual researchers and/or research groups. To organize the effort, a number of focus areas were identified. A group for each focus area met separately for several hours in order to set specific goals and devise a work plan for achieving those goals. On the final day of the workshop, the leader of each focus area reported back to the entire group.

Focus areas

Although some overlap was inevitable, four focus areas were identified prior to the meeting:

(1) ice dynamics and physics (2) ice shelf / ocean interactions (3) software design and coupling (4) initialization, verification, and validation