Articles | Volume 22, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/os-22-653-2026
© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/os-22-653-2026
© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Research article
| 
17 Feb 2026
Research article |
| 17 Feb 2026
| 17 Feb 2026
Characteristics of ocean mesoscale eddies in the Canadian Basin from a high resolution pan-Arctic model
Noémie Planat
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR
McGill University, Departement of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Montréal, Québec, Canada
Carolina Olivia Dufour
McGill University, Departement of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Montréal, Québec, Canada
University of Brest, CNRS, Ifremer, IRD, Laboratoire d'Océanographie Physique et Spatiale (LOPS), IUEM, 29280 Plouzané, France
Camille Lique
University of Brest, CNRS, Ifremer, IRD, Laboratoire d'Océanographie Physique et Spatiale (LOPS), IUEM, 29280 Plouzané, France
Jan Klaus Rieck
McGill University, Departement of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Montréal, Québec, Canada
Claude Talandier
University of Brest, CNRS, Ifremer, IRD, Laboratoire d'Océanographie Physique et Spatiale (LOPS), IUEM, 29280 Plouzané, France
Louis Bruno Tremblay
McGill University, Departement of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Montréal, Québec, Canada
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Florence L. Beaudry and L. Bruno Tremblay
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-2911, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-2911, 2026
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for The Cryosphere (TC).
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Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean moves under the action of waves and currents, causing it to deform along narrow lines where the ice opens or piles up. A standard way to evaluate whether models reproduce this behavior relies on how deformation changes with scale. Using synthetic ice fields, we show that this metric responds to how much opening and closing is happening overall, rather than to the organization of the deformation itself, raising caution to its use as a model evaluation tool.
Torge Martin, Carolina O. Dufour, Andrew J. S. Meijers, and Alyce M. Hancock
Ocean Sci., 22, 1429–1437, https://doi.org/10.5194/os-22-1429-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/os-22-1429-2026, 2026
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In the next 7 years major observational programs will be launched to improve our understanding of the Southern Ocean, the changes it is experiencing and its role in global warming. For these to advance current knowledge, we believe intense exchange with the numerical modelling community is essential. The survey results presented help to identify urgently needed observations for model development and underline the importance to explore new avenues in communication, collaboration and education.
Damien Ringeisen, Bruno Tremblay, Jean-Francois Lemieux, and Martin Losch
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-1845, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-1845, 2026
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for The Cryosphere (TC).
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Sea ice moves and deforms as wind and ocean currents push it around, creating narrow fracture lines on the surface. To accurately reproduce these fracture patterns in computer models used for climate predictions and navigation, we tested a mathematical approach to sea ice dynamics, common in other fields but rare in sea ice modeling, to see if it could better capture these patterns. Our results show this approach could improve fracture representation, though it requires more computing power.
Amélie Simon, Pierre Tandeo, Florian Sévellec, and Camille Lique
The Cryosphere, 19, 6639–6658, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-6639-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-6639-2025, 2025
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Through a machine learning technique based on seasonal cycles of sea-ice concentration from satellite data over the last 4 decades, our research shows that four regions are sufficient to best regionalize the Arctic. These regions are mainly organized into latitudinal bands and evolve in time and space. The descriptor proposed to monitor Arctic sea-ice changes is the probability to belong to each region. The probability to belong to the permanent sea-ice regions has decreased by 3.1 % per decade.
Jean-François Lemieux, Mathieu Plante, Nils Hutter, Damien Ringeisen, Bruno Tremblay, François Roy, and Philippe Blain
The Cryosphere, 19, 5639–5654, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-5639-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-5639-2025, 2025
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In sea ice models, the flow rule determines how sea ice deforms (opening, closing and shearing) when critical stresses are reached. We implemented in CICE a novel approach to define the flow rule. This is a useful capability as it allows to independently optimize critical stresses and deformations. As opposed to the standard flow rule, the novel approach can lead to a thicker and more active sea ice cover with narrower deformations.
Mathieu Plante, Jean-François Lemieux, L. Bruno Tremblay, Amélie Bouchat, Damien Ringeisen, Philippe Blain, Stephen Howell, Mike Brady, Alexander S. Komarov, Béatrice Duval, Lekima Yakuden, and Frédérique Labelle
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 423–434, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-423-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-423-2025, 2025
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Sea ice forms a thin boundary between the ocean and the atmosphere, with complex, crust-like dynamics and ever-changing networks of sea ice leads and ridges. Statistics of these dynamical features are often used to evaluate sea ice models. Here, we present a new pan-Arctic dataset of sea ice deformations derived from satellite imagery, from 1 September 2017 to 31 August 2023. We discuss the dataset coverage and some limitations associated with uncertainties in the computed values.
Sofia Allende, Anne Marie Treguier, Camille Lique, Clément de Boyer Montégut, François Massonnet, Thierry Fichefet, and Antoine Barthélemy
Geosci. Model Dev., 17, 7445–7466, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-7445-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-7445-2024, 2024
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We study the parameters of the turbulent-kinetic-energy mixed-layer-penetration scheme in the NEMO model with regard to sea-ice-covered regions of the Arctic Ocean. This evaluation reveals the impact of these parameters on mixed-layer depth, sea surface temperature and salinity, and ocean stratification. Our findings demonstrate significant impacts on sea ice thickness and sea ice concentration, emphasizing the need for accurately representing ocean mixing to understand Arctic climate dynamics.
Antoine Savard and Bruno Tremblay
The Cryosphere, 18, 2017–2034, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-2017-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-2017-2024, 2024
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We include a suitable plastic damage parametrization in the standard viscous–plastic (VP) sea ice model to disentangle its effect from resolved model physics (visco-plastic with and without damage) on its ability to reproduce observed scaling laws of deformation. This study shows that including a damage parametrization in the VP model improves its performance in simulating the statistical behavior of fracture patterns. Therefore, a damage parametrization is a powerful tuning knob.
Mathieu Plante, Jean-François Lemieux, L. Bruno Tremblay, Adrienne Tivy, Joey Angnatok, François Roy, Gregory Smith, Frédéric Dupont, and Adrian K. Turner
The Cryosphere, 18, 1685–1708, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-1685-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-1685-2024, 2024
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We use a sea ice model to reproduce ice growth observations from two buoys deployed on coastal sea ice and analyze the improvements brought by new physics that represent the presence of saline liquid water in the ice interior. We find that the new physics with default parameters degrade the model performance, with overly rapid ice growth and overly early snow flooding on top of the ice. The performance is largely improved by simple modifications to the ice growth and snow-flooding algorithms.
Oreste Marquis, Bruno Tremblay, Jean-François Lemieux, and Mohammed Islam
The Cryosphere, 18, 1013–1032, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-1013-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-1013-2024, 2024
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We developed a standard viscous–plastic sea-ice model based on the numerical framework called smoothed particle hydrodynamics. The model conforms to the theory within an error of 1 % in an idealized ridging experiment, and it is able to simulate stable ice arches. However, the method creates a dispersive plastic wave speed. The framework is efficient to simulate fractures and can take full advantage of parallelization, making it a good candidate to investigate sea-ice material properties.
Anne Marie Treguier, Clement de Boyer Montégut, Alexandra Bozec, Eric P. Chassignet, Baylor Fox-Kemper, Andy McC. Hogg, Doroteaciro Iovino, Andrew E. Kiss, Julien Le Sommer, Yiwen Li, Pengfei Lin, Camille Lique, Hailong Liu, Guillaume Serazin, Dmitry Sidorenko, Qiang Wang, Xiaobio Xu, and Steve Yeager
Geosci. Model Dev., 16, 3849–3872, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-3849-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-3849-2023, 2023
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The ocean mixed layer is the interface between the ocean interior and the atmosphere and plays a key role in climate variability. We evaluate the performance of the new generation of ocean models for climate studies, designed to resolve
ocean eddies, which are the largest source of ocean variability and modulate the mixed-layer properties. We find that the mixed-layer depth is better represented in eddy-rich models but, unfortunately, not uniformly across the globe and not in all models.
Guillaume Boutin, Einar Ólason, Pierre Rampal, Heather Regan, Camille Lique, Claude Talandier, Laurent Brodeau, and Robert Ricker
The Cryosphere, 17, 617–638, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-617-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-617-2023, 2023
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Sea ice cover in the Arctic is full of cracks, which we call leads. We suspect that these leads play a role for atmosphere–ocean interactions in polar regions, but their importance remains challenging to estimate. We use a new ocean–sea ice model with an original way of representing sea ice dynamics to estimate their impact on winter sea ice production. This model successfully represents sea ice evolution from 2000 to 2018, and we find that about 30 % of ice production takes place in leads.
Charles Brunette, L. Bruno Tremblay, and Robert Newton
The Cryosphere, 16, 533–557, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-533-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-533-2022, 2022
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Sea ice motion is a versatile parameter for monitoring the Arctic climate system. In this contribution, we use data from drifting buoys, winds, and ice thickness to parameterize the motion of sea ice in a free drift regime – i.e., flowing freely in response to the forcing from the winds and ocean currents. We show that including a dependence on sea ice thickness and taking into account a climatology of the surface ocean circulation significantly improves the accuracy of sea ice motion estimates.
Mathieu Plante and L. Bruno Tremblay
The Cryosphere, 15, 5623–5638, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-5623-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-5623-2021, 2021
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We propose a generalized form for the damage parameterization such that super-critical stresses can return to the yield with different final sub-critical stress states. In uniaxial compression simulations, the generalization improves the orientation of sea ice fractures and reduces the growth of numerical errors. Shear and convergence deformations however remain predominant along the fractures, contrary to observations, and this calls for modification of the post-fracture viscosity formulation.
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Short summary
We detect and track mesoscale eddies in the Canadian Basin of the Arctic Ocean and describe their spatio-temporal characteristics in a high resolution pan-Arctic model. Results show eddies of typical size 12 km, lasting 10 d and travelling 11 km, with roughly an equal number of cyclones and anticyclones detected. Seasonal, decadal and interannual changes of the number of eddies detected show strong correlations with the ice cover, and with the mean circulation of the basin.
We detect and track mesoscale eddies in the Canadian Basin of the Arctic Ocean and describe...
