Land Ice Working Group (LIWG)

The primary objectives of the Land Ice Working Group (LIWG) are (1) to couple a well validated, fully dynamical ice sheet model to the CESM, and (2) to determine the likely range of decade-to-century-scale sea-level rise associated with the loss of land ice. LIWG modeling activities include the large-scale simulation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, as well as finer-resolution modeling of glaciers and ice caps with the potential to alter sea level.

The dynamic ice sheet component of CESM is the Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM). The current version is CISM 2.1 (Lipscomb et al., 2019), which was released in June 2018 along with CESM2.0. CISM can be run either as a standalone model or as a component of CESM.

To better understand interactions between ice sheets and other parts of the climate system, the LIWG interacts closely with other working groups, including the Climate Change, Land Model, Ocean Model, Polar Climate, and Paleoclimate groups. Like other working groups, the LIWG meets twice a year: once at the annual CESM workshop in June and once during the winter.