Thanks, I had not come across this article! M Böttinger
https://www.dkrz.de) can be credited for the remarkable animation -- we rarely see hillshading to represent a variable (here thickness) on these forums other than NASA SVS productions.
Although these are effective as scientific visualizations (especially the mp4 linked below), they lose frame by frame data. I myself don't plan to "Download dataset as tab-delimited text" because this is better distributed (like RASM-ESRL forecasts) as two Geo2D time series within a single netCDF that can be operationally combined within Panoply (for alternatives to hillshading).
The AWI announcement does not point to a follow-up animation -- four years have gone by -- nor to an actively maintained near-real time archive that covers the current freeze season. The UH sea ice concentration netCDF archives are up to date but not properly geo-tagged (in contrast to the SMOS archive).
While we can agree that 'improving previous resolution from 111 km to some 4 km' is an important advance, it is no longer state of the art, given 200x better resolution from the ~.020 km daily resolution of Sentinel-1AB composited by R Saldo at DTU.
However the question is, does this improved resolution already pick the low hanging fruit in terms of capturing significant heat loss and new ice formation, or do we need to include the many narrow width but very long extent leads? That issue is discussed in the 7 subsequent papers citing this 2016 publication, notably the 2018 paper at 1 km.
For a valid article link, Wiley wants 'abstract' or 'full' on the end of links, here since it open source:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL068696/full Sea ice leads in the Arctic Ocean: Model assessment, interannual variability and trends
Q. Wang, S. Danilov, T. Jung, L. Kaleschke, A. Wernecke 13 July 2016
https://tinyurl.com/ydh9nzsr AWI press release links to HD versions of youtube
1995-2004
MP4 29.8 MB
https://tinyurl.com/yd7rd9nb too big for forum
2005-2014
MP4 27.9 MB
https://tinyurl.com/yd4k9u4n too big for forum
Q. Wang et al: FESOM Arctic Ocean sea ice concentration and thickness 1995-2014, links to movies in mp4 format. PANGAEA,
https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.860354 "Sea ice leads in the Arctic are important features that give rise to strong localized atmospheric heating; they provide the opportunity for vigorous biological primary production, and predicting leads may be of relevance for Arctic shipping. It is
commonly believed that traditional sea ice models that employ elastic-viscous-plastic (EVP) rheologies are not capable of properly simulating sea ice deformation, including lead formation, and thus, new formulations for sea ice rheologies have been suggested.
Here we show that classical sea ice models have skill in simulating the spatial and temporal variation of lead area fraction in the Arctic when horizontal resolution is increased (here 4.5 km in the Arctic) and when numerical convergence in sea ice solvers is considered, which is frequently neglected.
...The scientists used a widely known theory, which describes the material qualities of the sea ice as an elastic-viscous-plastic medium. This was often criticised in recent years. But 'the new results show that the old theory for sea-ice physics still remains valid, if the calculation is performed with high accuracy'.
The model results are consistent with satellite remote sensing data and discussed in terms of variability and trends of Arctic sea ice leads. It is found, for example, that wintertime lead area fraction during the last three decades has
not undergone significant trends.
Supplement: Northern Hemisphere sea ice from a Finite-Element Sea-Ice Ocean Model (FESOM) 4.5 km resolution simulation. Concentration is shown with color; thickness is shown with shading. A global 1 degree mesh is used, with the "Arctic Ocean" locally refined to 4.5 km. South of CAA and Fram Strait the resolution is not refined in this simulation. The animation indicates that the 4.5 km model resolution helps to represent the small scale sea ice features, although much higher resolution is required to fully resolve the ice leads.
Even in cold winters, more and more leads are forming due to wind and currents, which only adds up to a small amount of the total area, but is responsible for a large part of the growth in ice.'
A 4.5 km resolution Arctic Ocean simulation with the globalmulti-resolution model FESOM1.4
Q Wang et al 24 July 2017
https://www.geosci-model-dev-discuss.net/gmd-2017-136/gmd-2017-136.pdf
Scaling Properties of Arctic Sea Ice Deformation in a High-Resolution Viscous-Plastic Sea Ice Model and in Satellite Observations
N Hutter et al 8 January 2018
Sea ice models with the traditional viscous-plastic (VP) rheology and very small horizontal grid spacing can resolve leads and deformation rates localized along Linear Kinematic Features (LKF). In a 1-km pan-Arctic sea ice-ocean simulation, the small scale sea-ice deformations are evaluated with a scaling analysis in relation to satellite observations in the Central Arctic.... The agreement of the spatial scaling with satellite observations challenges previous results with VP models at coarser resolution, which did not reproduce the observed scaling. The temporal scaling analysis shows that the VP model, as configured in this 1-km simulation, does not fully resolve the intermittency of sea ice deformation that is observed in satellite data.
To summarize, our understanding of various Arctic Ocean ice physical processes is demonstrably improving, as is near-real time tracking of the current season, but the ability to make end-of-season or multi-year predictions is not advancing. We understand better what is happening (and why) but not what will happen in the future, other than trend lines.
The problem with unpredictability, given the phenomenon of Arctic amplification, is Arctic sea ice is a leading indicator -- indeed driver -- of global climate change. Lacking a solid foundation here, ambitious 'coupled' climate models are not in a position to reliably predict the future, notably because the onset and consequences of positive feedbacks from Arctic sea ice loss can't be anticipated.