Development of a new sea ice growth and lead parameterization

A thermodynamic sea ice model that has been numerically structured to take time steps on the order of a week has been shown to be sensitive to time step size. This sensitivity was caused by the extrapolation of initial ice growth rates over the long time step. A new parameterization of new sea ice growth on open ocean and in leads that can be used over a large range of time step sizes (at least from 0.3 to 12 days) is described here. In this parameterization new sea ice growth is computed as a power law function of the initial energy deficit in the ocean. This power law takes into account the rapid reduction of the ice growth rate as the sea ice gets thicker, and therefore reduces sensitivity to time step size. Tests of this parameterization show that this method does a good job of simulating the rate of new ice growth when compared to data from Mawson, Antarctica, and is relatively insensitive to the length of the time step.