Violette Zunz

OS Ocean Sciences

The 2013 Outstanding Student Poster (OSP) Award is awarded to Violette Zunz for the poster/PICO entitled:

How does internal variability influence the ability of CMIP5 models to reproduce the recent trend in Southern Ocean sea ice extent? (Zunz, V.; Goosse, H.; Massonnet, F.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Violette Zunz is a PhD student at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) in the Georges Lemaître Centre for Earth and Climate Research, under the supervision of Pr. Hugues Goosse. Her research aims at identifying a method that could improve the quality and the reliability of decadal climate predictions in the Southern Ocean. The poster presented at the EGU General Assembly 2013 proposed an analysis of the ability of general circulation models involved in CMIP5 to reproduce the observed increasing trend in sea ice extent in the Southern Ocean, during the last 30 years. This study has shown that (1) models generally respond to the external forcing by reducing their sea ice extent in the Southern Ocean, (2) they often overestimate the internal variability of this sea ice extent and, (3) the initialisation methods currently used do not bring any clear improvement of the simulated evolution of the sea ice extent.