Interactive coupling of a Greenland ice sheet model in NorESM2

Abstract

On the backdrop of observed accelerating ice sheet mass loss over the last few decades, there is growing interest in the role of ice sheet changes in global climate projections. In this regard, we have coupled the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM) with the Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM) and have produced an initial set of climate projections including an interactive coupling with a dynamic Greenland ice sheet. Our focus in this manuscript is the description of the coupling, the model setup and the initialisation procedure. To illustrate the effect of the coupling, we have further performed one chain of experiments under historical forcing and subsequently under high future greenhouse gas forcing (SSP5-8.5) until 2100 and extended until 2300. We find a limited impact of the dynamical ice sheet changes on the global response of the coupled model under the given forcing and experimental setup when comparing to a standard CMIP6 simulation of NorESM with a fixed ice sheet.