This award is for support of an ice sheet modeling summer school that responds to the need for both improved physics in the models and well trained scientists able to make those improvements. The summer school will be held at Portland State University in August 2009. The list of topics to be covered during the two-week summer school include the theoretical basis of ice sheet models, code development, data for model initialization and performance, hypothesis testing, model sensitivity, stability, and parameter estimation, the community ice sheet model (CISM), the community climate system model (CCSM). The school is designed with a collaborative, problem solving framework. Participants span a range of experience levels, from senior scientists in lecturer roles, to invited young scientists, to graduate students selected by application. Participants have been invited from both academic institutions and national research labs. This framework is in keeping with a community model development strategy that makes resources available to the widest possible range of researchers.
The intellectual merit of this project is that ice sheet contribution to sea level rise is observed to have transitioned from slightly negative to positive and growing over the last decade. At the same time, rapid changes in ice discharge have been observed in Greenland and in some Antarctic regions. How long or at what magnitude these trends will continue is unknown. The climate system models now in use to make future projections were not designed to address the physical processes associated with rapid fluctuations in ice such as those now observed. Thus, there is considerable recent interest in improving the representation of ice sheet dynamics in climate system models.
The broader impacts of this activity include not only the education and training of the next generation of polar researchers but also the relevance to a topic of importance to society. The summer school follows from an ice sheet modeling workshop held during the 2008 Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and International Arctic Science Committee joint meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia. We anticipate that this program too will lead to other, similar events in the years ahead. The opportunity for working interaction among an inter-institutional group of senior and junior researchers is rare and we anticipate that it will lead to future research collaborations. Lecture notes and exercises will be collected into a summer school document and distributed to participants as well as the wider glaciological and climate modeling community. This, and other resources, will also be available at a website maintained at the University of Montana. The group of lecturers, other invited participants, and student applicants is international. About 30% of the invitees and 20% of student applicants are women.
