Abstract

Despite enormous scientific and technological progress in numerical weather and climate prediction, sea ice still remains unreliably predicted by models, both in short term forecasting and climate projection applications. The total ice extent in both hemispheres is tied to the location of the ice edge, and consequently to what happens in the portion of the ice cover immediately adjacent to the open ocean that is called the marginal ice zone (MIZ). There is mounting evidence that processes occurring in the MIZ might play an important role in the polar climate yet some key physical processes are still missing in models, most of which are related to ocean waves and their interactions with sea ice through numerous nonlinear processes. As sea ice models originally designed for climate research are increasingly used for operational forecasting, the missing physics impede also short-term sea ice prediction skills. In this talk I will use recent observational evidences obtained from the St.Lawrence Estuary and the Arctic that shows the importance of embracing all MIZ constituents, namely the atmosphere, the ocean, waves and sea ice properties, and their inherent heterogeneity, when investigating wave-ice interactions.