What is our Focus Group About? 

Focus Group Statement (Task F1)

It is widely recognized that there are a range of physical interactions and feedbacks (Fyke et al., 2018) between the changing ice sheets and the atmosphere and ocean on their boundaries play a major role in determining the rate of mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica on multi-decadal to centennial timescales (e.g. Gregory et al., 2020). These process interactions are extremely challenging to model accurately in the global-scale Earth System Models (ESMs) that the science community has had until now due to the inherent mismatch between the spatial and temporal scales for the numerics that ice sheet models use and those appropriate to atmosphere and ocean models. The community has made major progress in the last few years (Muntjewerf et al., 2020, Smith et al., 2021) and two-way coupled ESM-ISMs are starting to become available for this purpose. Although the current state-of-the-art ESM-ISMs are not yet sufficiently mature to be used to directly produce projections of sea level rise, they can be used to investigate ice sheet - climate feedbacks in real detail and show us where neglecting these interactions in standalone ESMs and ISMs becomes important. The ISMIP7 ESM-ISM focus group comprises members from every CMIP modeling group that is developing ice sheet coupling and has developed a protocol for a set of simulations that will let us systematically intercompare our different modeling approaches and demonstrate where and when the climate - ice sheet coupling currently missing from standalone ISM simulations should modify our interpretation of the ISMIP7 sea level rise projections. In the second half of the project the individual ESM-ISM groups will have completed the highest priority simulations in the ISMIP7 ESM-ISM protocol, and in this task we will analyze of the outputs across the different models, coordinating between the different ESM groups and lead the publication of the results.

Focus Group Goals:

1. Build community and promote the integration of ice sheet modeling in ESMs
   
   

2. Develop the ESM-ISM coupling protocol for ISMIP7