Land Ice Working Group (LIWG)

The primary goals of the Land Ice Working Group (LIWG) are (1) to couple a well validated, fully dynamical land-ice model to the Community Earth System Model, and (2) to understand and predict sea-level changes and other natural hazards associated with the evolution of land ice. LIWG modeling activities include the large-scale simulation of the Greenland, Antarctic, and paleo ice sheets, as well as finer-resolution modeling of glaciers and ice caps, under past, present, and future conditions.

The dynamic ice sheet component of CESM is the Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM), which can run either as a standalone model or a coupled Earth System model component. CISM v2.1 (Lipscomb et al., 2019) was released in June 2018 along with CESM2.0. We plan to release CISM v3.0 in conjunction with CESM 3.0.

To better understand interactions between ice sheets and other parts of the climate system, the LIWG interacts closely with other working groups, including the 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.