1.1. About CICE

The Los Alamos sea ice model (CICE) is the result of an effort to develop a computationally efficient sea ice component for a fully coupled atmosphere–land global climate model. It was designed to be compatible with the Parallel Ocean Program (POP), an ocean circulation model developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory for use on massively parallel computers [66][13][14]. The current version of the model has been enhanced greatly through collaborations with members of the community.

CICE has several interacting components: a thermodynamic model that computes local growth rates of snow and ice due to vertical conductive, radiative and turbulent fluxes, along with snowfall; a model of ice dynamics, which predicts the velocity field of the ice pack based on a model of the material strength of the ice; a transport model that describes advection of the areal concentration, ice volumes and other state variables; and a ridging parameterization that transfers ice among thickness categories based on energetic balances and rates of strain.External routines would prepare and execute data exchanges with an external “flux coupler,” which then passes the data to other climate model components such as POP.

Details about this model release and a list of major changes are found in Major CICE updates and the model code is available from https://github.com/CICE-Consortium/CICE.

Please cite any use of the CICE code. More information can be found at Citing the CICE code.

This document uses the following text conventions: Variable names used in the code are typewritten. Subroutine names are given in italic. File and directory names are in boldface. A comprehensive Index of primary variables and parameters, including glossary of symbols with many of their values, appears at the end of this guide.