Assessment of Arctic sea ice simulations in CMIP5 models

Abstract. The Arctic sea ice cover has experienced an unprecedented decline since the late 20th century. As a result, the feedback of sea ice anomalies to atmospheric circulation has been increasingly evidenced. While the climate models almost consistently reproduce the downward trend of sea ice cover, great dispersion between them still exists. To evaluate the model performance in simulating Arctic sea ice and its potential role in climate change, we constructed a reasonable metric by synthesizing the linear trends and anomalies of the sea ice. We particularly focus on the Barents and Kara seas, where the sea ice anomalies have the greatest potential to feedback the atmosphere. Models can be grouped into three categories according to this criterion. The strong contrast among the multi-model ensemble means in different groups demonstrates the robustness and rationality of this method. The potential factors accounting for the different performance of climate models are further explored. The result shows that the model performance depends more on the ozone datasets prescribed by model rather than on the chemistry representation of ozone.