Moving beyond the Total Sea Ice Extent in Gauging Model Biases.

Reproducing characteristics of observed sea ice extent remains an important climate modeling challenge. In this study we describe several approaches to improve how model biases in total sea ice distribution are quantified, and apply them to historically forced simulations contributed to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5). The quantity of hemispheric total sea ice area, or some measure of its equatorward extent is often used to evaluate model performance.