The major goal of the workshop is to coordinate modeling activities between SEARCH and DAMOCLES programs in conjunction with AOMIP and (C)ARCMIP projects during IPY and beyond. Though the workshop is targeting at modeling activities, observers are strongly encouraged to attend the workshop. Some tasks are specifically designed to stimulate the discussion between modelers and observers.

Tasks

• Improvement of models

Improvement of atmospheric, oceanic, sea ice, terrestrial, and arctic climate
regional models and provision of recommendations to global modeling communities
on how to improve representation of the Arctic in global models. How can we best reduce uncertainties in model predictions?

• Process studies

Are there processes not (well) modeled in present-day Arctic models? Themes that should be discussed are for example: atmospheric boundary layer, tidal mixing in the ocean, multi-layer sea-ice model and coupled feedbacks. This task is also intended to stimulate the exchange between modelers concerned with process studies and regional to global-scale modelers.

• Reliability of reanalyzes in the Arctic

The reanalyzes of NCAR and ECMWF are the most widely used forcing data sets for regional models. However, it is little known about the uncertainties of these data in the Arctic and Subarctic. Especially the hydrological cycle in the Arctic should be discussed.

• Enhance coordination of experiments

Increase of the effectiveness of model development and model validation through coordinated design of numerical experiments and long-term model runs, coordinated forcing, model initialization, and analyses. How to avoid duplication, ensure transfer of knowledge and generally enhance effectiveness of modeling activities?

• Data and Models. (“What are modelers doing with our observations?” - “Which data do we need from the observers for our models?”)

This task should stimulate the exchange of knowledge between modelers and observers. Some modelers are just processing the data gathered by observers without any feedback to the observers. Within this task contributions are welcome which demonstrate how observations are used by modelers and what kind of data modelers need for their activities. Also we will discuss how the data exchange can be facilitated between data collectors and modelers performing data assimilation. This task naturally leads to the next task.

• Enhance synthesis and integration

Enhance synthesis and integration among modeling and observational efforts and develop an optimized scheme for an observational network potentially capable to satisfy needs of both, observational and modeling communities.