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Research / Arctic & Sea Ice

What does the changing ice tell us about the changing Arctic?

From sea-ice age and drift to exchanges of heat with the atmosphere: testing the processes that shape a rapidly changing region.

Modelled and observed Arctic sea-ice drift, with a map of model bias
Model–observation comparison from Ólason et al. (2026), Fig. 9. CC BY 4.0; original colours retained. Research context ↗

Compare like with like

A difference between a model and an observation can come from the physics, but it can also come from the way the quantity was calculated. With Heather Regan, Anton Korosov, Jakob Dörr, Philipp Griewank and Einar Ólason, I applied a common sea-ice-age method to make the comparison more informative.

Follow the moving ice

Age, drift, fractures and open leads reveal different aspects of sea-ice change. Lagrangian methods follow the ice as it moves. I am a co-author of the neXtSIM v2 model paper, part of a wider collaboration on sea-ice dynamics and interactions with the ocean and atmosphere.

Evaluate the Arctic in climate models

With Stephen Outten, I examined how the Arctic surface climate is represented in CMIP6 relative to CMIP5. The aim is to identify which processes and biases matter for interpreting future change.

Processes, projects and collaborators

I led ARIA at NERSC, investigating atmosphere–sea-ice interactions, and served as NERSC project leader for KeyCLIM. SAGE is an ESA-supported collaboration led at NERSC by Anton Korosov; my contributions include sea-ice-age methods and model–observation comparison. NERSC also participates in Arctic Ocean 2050, led there by Helene Langehaug.

Research record

Key papers

Geoscientific Model Development · 2026Co-author

The next generation sea-ice model neXtSIM, version 2

A team-developed model of sea-ice dynamics, including fractures, deformation and interactions with the ocean and atmosphere.

Authors & paper

Einar Ólason, Guillaume Boutin, Timothy Williams, Anton Korosov, Heather Regan, Jonathan Rheinlænder, Pierre Rampal, Daniela Flocco, Abdoulaye Samaké, Richard Davy, Timothy Spain, Sean Chua

doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-6467-2026

In conversation

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