The main goal of AOIP is to improve our understanding of atmosphere-ocean-ice interaction processes, as well as our ability to model them and their impact. The underlying goal is to assess the need for these processes to be correctly simulated in the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM), to help defining the path for its future development, and to thus to help establish it as one of the reference tools to explore the climate in polar and sub-polar regions. AOIP focuses on selected processes that are known or suspected to be important in shaping the polar and subpolar atmosphere-ocean-ice system, both through local interactions and large-scale effects.

To this end we divide the project roughly along the lines of different scales, considering local processes in work package 1, mesoscale processes in work package 2, and basin-scale processes in work package 3. At the local scale, we focus on process understanding; the two main objectives being to investigate the role of lead formation in modulating the ocean-atmosphere heat-fluxes in the Arctic, and to investigate the atmospheric response to surface conditions in the marginal ice zone (MIZ). At the mesoscale, we will perform case studies investigating the role of mesoscale atmospheric behaviour and its model representation on sea-ice breakups and large-scale reconfiguration of the ice cover. We will also investigate the atmospheric response in the MIZ, evaluating atmosphere and sea-ice simulations against aircraft observations. At the basin scale, we will focus on ocean heat content and how the atmosphere influences ocean heat transport towards the Arctic. We will investigate how the modelled ocean mean state and variability depends on atmosphere-ocean-ice heat fluxes, and how observed and modelled ocean heat transport depends on the wind driven gyre circulation in the ocean.