Ensemble of sea ice initial conditions for interannual climate predictions

Polar climate studies are severely hampered by the sparseness of the sea ice observations. We aim at filling this critical gap by producing two 5-member sea ice historical simulations strongly constrained by ocean and atmosphere observational data and covering the 1958–2006 and 1979–2012 periods. This is the first multi-member sea ice reconstruction covering more than 50 years. The obtained sea ice conditions are in reasonable agreement with the few available observations. These best estimates of sea ice conditions serve subsequently as initial sea ice conditions for a set of 28 3-year-long retrospective climate predictions. We compare it to a set in which the sea ice initial conditions are taken from a single-member sea ice historical simulation constrained by atmosphere observations only. We find an improved skill in predicting the Arctic sea ice area and Arctic near surface temperature but a slightly degraded skill in predicting the Antarctic sea ice area. We also obtain a larger spread between the members for the sea ice variables, thus more representative of the forecast error.