The NOAA Climate Program Office Modeling, 
Analysis, Predictions and Projections (MAPP) Program co-sponsored and co-organized the recent Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) Community Sea Ice Model Recommendation Workshop in Boulder, Colorado on February 3rd through 4th. The overall goal of the workshop was to advance NOAA sea ice forecasting on weather to seasonal timescales.
General circulation models that simulate Earth’s climate have shown that our world’s polar regions are especially sensitive to small changes in climate. Sea ice models are important for providing information on how these polar regions evolve and how they will be affected by such changes and, conversely, how the polar regions will impact climate. In the short term, there is great interest in developing skillful sea-ice predictions on weather to seasonal timescales as part of global Earth system models because of the many NOAA stakeholders that would benefit from such information. The NGGPS sea ice modeling workshop brought together experts to review candidate models and criteria for selecting a community sea ice model for the Next Generation Global Prediction System, a planned NWS unified system for weather to climate prediction co-sponsored by the MAPP program, as well as to discuss potential research and development opportunities and gaps. The group recommended criteria and metrics and a short list of candidate sea ice models to be tested for the NGGPS. Next steps include to develop a workshop report including a summary including plans for testing and evaluation.
To view workshop notes and presentations, go to: http://www.dtcenter.org/events/workshops16/seaice/