2014 Sea Ice Outlook Action Team Goals and Members

The 2014 Sea Ice Outlook (SIO) Action Team convened from early October to late December 2014. This Action Team was lead by SIPN Project Principal Investigator Julienne Stroeve and was convened and supported by ARCUS.

Goals for the 2014 SIO Action team included:

• Work with the SIPN leadership team to develop a SIO post-season report to assess and summarize the physical processes that factored into the sea ice dynamics during the 2014 melt season, as well as a discussion of the various outlook methods.
• Develop a short summary of recommendations for changes and improvements to the SIO for the 2015 season.
• Contribute to other publications or presentations based on the 2014 SIO season and post-season report.

2014 SIO Action Team Members

Julienne C. Stroeve received a PhD in geography from the University of Colorado Boulder, in 1996, for her work in understanding Greenland climate variability. Subsequently she has been a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) within the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). Her Arctic research interests include atmosphere-sea ice interactions, sea ice predictability, climate change and associated impacts. She has conducted several Arctic field campaigns. Recent research is focused on understanding rapid Arctic change and what this will mean for the rest of the planet. Dr. Stroeve's work has been featured in numerous magazines, news reports, radio shows, and TV documentaries. She has given keynote addresses around the world on Arctic climate issues and briefed former Vice President Al Gore. Dr. Stroeve has published more than 50 articles on peer-reviewed journals and contributed to several national and international reports on climate change.

Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth is a research scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle where he obtained his PhD in 2013. His PhD work was focused on describing and understanding the timescales of sea ice variability and the limits of potential predictability in dynamical models. Recently he has been involved in developing operational sea ice predictability and is a member of the Sea Ice Prediction Network. He is currently also investigating snow cover on sea ice in observations and models, and studying the possible impacts of snow cover changes on sea ice predictability.

virginie.guemas [at] ic3.cat (Virginie Guemas) is lead researcher for polar climate prediction at the Institut Catalá de Ciéncias del Clima (IC3, Barcelona, Spain). Her research focuses mainly on the variability and predictability of the Arctic sea ice conditions and their impact on the mid-latitude climate. Her objectives involve generating Arctic sea ice reconstructions over the last few decades to initialize climate predictions, exploiting these reconstructions to extract recurrent and/or persistent variability patterns; assessing dynamical prediction skill in the Arctic and surrounding regions; and refining current estimates of the long-term rate of Arctic sea ice loss. For more information about Virginie Guemas, please visit her home page.

Stephen.Howell [at] ec.gc.ca (Stephen Howell) is a Research Scientist in sea ice and climate interaction at Environment Canada and Adjunct Professor at University of Ottawa, Department of Geography. His research includes developing new knowledge on the state, variability, and change in the cryosphere and its role in the climate system; as well as sea ice of the Canadian Arctic; sea ice dynamics and thermodynamics; Arctic climatology and climate change; and remote sensing of ice and snow. For more information about Stephen Howell, please visit his home page.

francois.massonnet [at] uclouvain.be (François Massonnet) obtained his PhD in Sciences in 2014 from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Brussels. During his PhD, he developed various metrics to evaluate sea ice models used in the framework of climate reconstructions, predictions, and projections. He also implemented data assimilation methods in large-scale sea ice models for state and parameter estimation. He is now a Fonds pour la Recherche Scientifique - National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.- NFSR) Post-Doctoral Fellow at the UCL and does extended scientific visits at the Catalan Institute of Climate Sciences (IC3, Barcelona, Spain) where he explores the seasonal-to-interannual predictability of extreme winters at mid-latitudes in response to Arctic climate change. For more information about Francois Massonnet, please visit his home page.

s.tietsche [at] reading.ac.uk (Steffen Tietsche) is a research scientist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Most of his work is concerned with Arctic predictability and predictions on seasonal to interannual time scales. He has also published research on sea ice data assimilation and the response of Arctic sea ice to climate change. Steffen obtained his PhD in ocean and climate modeling in 2012 from the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg. He recently became more involved in the impact of Arctic sea ice on weather and seasonal forecasts when he held a short position as a visiting scientist at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
For more information about Steffen Tietsche, please visit his home page.