Air-sea-ice interactions during the development of Polar lows
Abstract
Polar lows, or arctic hurricanes, are intense mesoscale cyclones over high-latitude oceans, their frequency and genesis region are sensitive to the rapid warming over the Arctic. They significantly affect the ocean circulation and polar climate, and pose a considerable
risk to shipping, offshore activities, and coastal society in high latitudes. However, polar lows are poorly represented in climate and numerical weather predication models due to their small spatial scale (200-1000 km) and short-life (6-36 h). Previous studies about polar lows are mainly based on atmospheric stand-alone models, which give an obstacle for the understanding of polar lows. During polar low development, many small-scale physical processes at the air-sea/ice interface play vital roles, which are poorly investigated. Among
them, the fragmented knowledge of the interaction between waves, currents, ice, and atmosphere over polar regions are one of the main limits to our understanding of polar lows. The interaction processes can only be captured in a fully coupled model with proper
parameterizations.
This is a PhD thesis project supported by VR. In this project, we will use the UU-CM coupled model (an atmosphere-wave-ocean-ice coupled model) to investigate the impacts of air-wave-sea-ice interactions on the polar low development.
The simulation data will need more storage space.