A High-Resolution Model of the Beaufort Sea Circulation

Katherine Hedstrom1, Seth L Danielson1, Enrique N Curchitser2, Jean-Francois Lemieux3 and Jeremy Kasper4, (1)UAF, College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, Fairbanks, AK, United States, (2)Rutgers University New Brunswick, Department of Environmental Sciences, New Brunswick, NJ, United States, (3)Environment Canada, Meteorological Research Division, Quebec, QC, Canada, (4)University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, United States
Abstract:
Configuration of and results from a coupled sea-ice ocean model of the Beaufort Sea shelf at 900 m resolution will be shown. Challenging features of the domain include large fresh water flux from the MacKenzie River, seasonal land-fast ice, and ice-covered open boundary conditions. A pan-Arctic domain provides boundary fields for both the ocean and sea-ice models (Regional Ocean Modeling System - myroms.org). Both models are forced with river inputs from the ARDAT climatology (Whitefield et al., 2015), which includes heat content as well as flow rate. Coastal discharges are prescribed as lateral inflows distributed over the depth of the ocean-land interface. New in the Beaufort domain is the use of a landfast ice parameterization (Lemieux, 2015), which adds a large bottom stress to the ice when the estimated keel depth approaches that of the ocean.
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