A science plan for regional arctic system modeling a report by the arctic research community for the National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs

Cover design by Russell Mitchell. Graph updated from Figure 1 of Stroeve et al. (2007) showing arctic September sea ice extent from observations (thick red line) and 13 IPCC AR4 climate models, together with the multi-model ensemble mean (solid black line) and standard deviation (dotted black line). The geodesic grid is one of many computational mesh configurations used for arctic modeling. The equation represents flow in an incompressible Stokes fluid, sometimes used to model hydrodynamics. Hexagonal insets, from left to right, are polar U.S. Coast Guard operations, reindeer herding, a Cray XT5 computer (courtesy of Mary Haley, Arctic Region Supercomputing Center), and the Russian port of Provideniya, in the Bering Strait. We are also grateful for support provided for one of three workshops that contributed to this report by SEARCH for DAMOCLES, the Ca-nadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, Centre pour l'étude et la simulation du climat à l'échelle

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