Sea ice floe size: its impact on pan-Arctic and local ice mass and required model complexity

Bateson, Adam William; Feltham, Daniel L.; Schröder, David; Wang, Yanan; Hwang, Byongjun; Ridley, Jeff K.; Aksenov, Yevgeny

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-2565-2022

Articles | Volume 16, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-2565-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-2565-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 6

Research article

|

28 Jun 2022

Research article |

| 28 Jun 2022

Sea ice floe size: its impact on pan-Arctic and local ice mass and required model complexity

Adam William Bateson, Daniel L. Feltham, David Schröder, Yanan Wang, Byongjun Hwang, Jeff K. Ridley, and Yevgeny Aksenov

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Final revised paper (published on 28 Jun 2022)
Preprint (discussion started on 08 Sep 2021)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on tc-2021-217', Anonymous Referee #1, 27 Sep 2021

Please find my comments in the file attached.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2021-217-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Adam Bateson, 04 Feb 2022
  
  Please see the supplement for our compiled response to all referee and editor comments.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2021-217-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on tc-2021-217', Anonymous Referee #2, 03 Nov 2021

Please find comments in the attached PDF.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2021-217-RC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Adam Bateson, 04 Feb 2022
  
  Please see the supplement for our compiled response to all referee and editor comments.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2021-217-AC2

Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (08 Mar 2022) by Johannes J. Fürst

AR by Adam Bateson on behalf of the Authors (11 Mar 2022) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (22 Mar 2022) by Johannes J. Fürst

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (06 Apr 2022)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revisions that the authors have made on the manuscript have substantially improved its quality. I appreciate the responses to my major comments and the additional text that has been added. I have a number of remaining comments on this version of the manuscript. After these comments have been addressed, I believe the manuscript should be published and will make a meaningful contribution to the literature on modeling of floe size distribution in the Arctic.

• P1L29-31: suggestion to reverse sentence so that the abstract ends on a positive note. “We note that although the WIPoFSD model is unable to represent potentially important features of annual FSD evolution seen with the prognostic model, it is less computationally expensive…possibly making this a stronger candidate for inclusion in climate models.”
• P2L23: Are FSD models where shape is fixed always to a power law? If so, note
• P3L18-19: Note/make clear that the prognostic mixed-layer model is an ocean model
• P3L34-36: Suggest moving sentence beginning with “Full details…” to earlier in the paragraph, remove the sentence beginning with “Below we provide…” and simplifying “In section…” to “The adaption of lateral melt for FSD models will be introduced in section 2.1.4”.
• P4L39: subscript a missing from C^{f,floe}?
• P6L5: appears that l_eff,n has . rather than ,
• Section 2.2.2: It seems that I disagree with Reviewer 1, as I found it disorienting to read this material in the methods, which seems to me to belong in the introduction. In my read, I would suggest P6L8-38 should be in the introduction. One possible compromise would be to add sub-sections to the introduction (uncommon, but a feature I appreciate as a reader) such that the background on brittle fracture doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the background presented. Ultimately, I suppose it should be up to the authors how to handle this organizational issue.
• P7L23: missing “such” after sufficiently
• P9~L18-25: Note explicitly that prog-best includes brittle fracture
• P9L25: Do you or could you briefly explore the sensitivity to these parameter choices? Or is there some references that could be included here? It would be good to clarify how sensitive the results are/are not to this fitting.
• Section 3.2: Apologies if this is explained elsewhere, but why is only the prognostic model compared to observations, and not WIPo-FSD? I suppose this is because the observational comparison is focused on showing that the brittle fracture improves comparisons, but it seems to me that comparing both would be useful, still. Explain reasoning here (or consider including in figures)
• P11L23-24: Just to reiterate the comment above, I think this statement necessitates including the WIPo model results in Fig 4
• P12L5: I think this sentence perhaps overstates the impact still. Delete “significant”, and perhaps add that there is less change the the level of observational uncertainty
• P12L12: delete “generally”. Similar to comment above, make more clear that this is well within the observational uncertainty.
• P12L18: Consider including the percent relative change of MIZ extent for the month with greatest difference?
• P12L19: Note that tense is inconsistent across sub-headings
• P12L30: edit to specifically note that the ribbon shows 2 standard deviation, not just the range
• P14L21: discriminates should be discriminate
• P18L30: ice-thickness distribution has a hyphen here, but not elsewhere (ice thickness distribution). Suggest the author check throughout paper for consistency (i.e., remove all such hyphens)
• Fig 1: Edits are generally helpful. However, the y-values in the lower subpanel are now inconsistent with the examples shown above. Please edit the bar sizes to agree with the furthest right example, and perhaps make it clear that this is where it’s coming from (such as with corresponding letter or box)
• Fig 2: delete repeated sentence from caption
• Fig 4: As noted above, should add WIPo-best here, but also prog-best. Otherwise, the link between this figure and result (using prog-16) and subsequent results (with prog-best, 12 categories) is not explicit
• Figures 7,8. Make colors consistent throughout, i.e., WIPo-best always blue, prog-best always red
• Figure 7 caption: replace “ribbon” with “shading”; remove “the region spanned by”
• Figure 10: I believe I commented on this in the previous round, but I still find it hard to believe that the thickness change is really on the order of meters. Please confirm that this should not be cm?

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (11 Apr 2022)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (20 Apr 2022) by Johannes J. Fürst

AR by Adam Bateson on behalf of the Authors (29 Apr 2022) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (17 May 2022) by Johannes J. Fürst

Short summary

Numerical models are used to understand the mechanisms that drive the evolution of the Arctic sea ice cover. The sea ice cover is formed of pieces of ice called floes. Several recent studies have proposed variable floe size models to replace the standard model assumption of a fixed floe size. In this study we show the need to include floe fragmentation processes in these variable floe size models and demonstrate that model design can determine the impact of floe size on size ice evolution.