On the representation of Arctic sea ice in climate models

Abstract

The performance of seven models participating in the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) in simulating historical Arctic sea ice concentration is assessed against observations. Although individually the models are not too accurate, the CMIP6 multimodel mean adequately replicates the mean annual cycle and the declining sea ice observed trends. Regional model biases have also been identified in the spatial distribution of sea ice