CICE

The Los Alamos sea ice model (CICE) is the result of an effort to develop a computationally efficient sea ice component for use in fully coupled, atmosphere-ice-ocean-land global climate models, and it was originally developed to be compatible with the  Parallel Ocean Program (POP). CICE was used in several of the climate models contributing to the recent  Fourth Assessment Report of the  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Although it is designed for global climate modeling, CICE can also be used in standalone mode for sea ice simulations. The current version of the model has been enhanced greatly through collaborations with members of the  Community Climate System Model  Polar Climate Working Group, based at the  National Center for Atmospheric Research, and researchers at the  U. K. Met Office Hadley Centre.

Source code, documentation and data sets

The CICE code is freely available under a CopyRight agreement, including full documentation and basic forcing data for testing. CICE version 4.0 was publicly released in August, 2008. The main web page with documentation and downloads is here:

SourceCode

 CICE Documentation and User's Guide (pdf)

Mailing List

If you would like announcements about releases and other CICE information, you can subscribe to the cice-users list. To subscribe, send an e-mail to listmanager@… with the message "subscribe cice-users". We will need to confirm your request before you are officially added.

CICE: the name

After many years "CICE" has finally become an acronym, for "Community Ice CodE." The Los Alamos developers still pronounce the name as "sea ice," but there has been a small grass-roots movement underway to alter the model name's pronunciation to what an Italian might say, "chee-chay." Others choose to say "sice" (English, rhymes with "ice"), "seese" (French, like "cease") or "shii-aisu" (Japanese). However you pronounce it, it is CICE, the Los Alamos Sea Ice Model.

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