Sea ice is an important component of the Earth’s climate system and strongly affects marine ecosystems and human activities in both hemispheres. Sea ice is changing rapidly on various temporal and spatial scales, and systematic observations and modelling across these scales is required to better understand underlying processes and interactions, and to predict the ice’s future fate. This symposium will invite contributions by the international sea ice research community to exchange recent findings and advances in observations, process understanding, and modelling of sea ice worldwide. While the focus of the symposium will be on the physical ocean–ice–atmosphere system, cross-cutting interdisciplinary contributions are invited from fields such as sea-ice ecology and biogeochemistry, ice engineering, human use of the sea-ice environment, and others.

Key focus areas include (but are not limited to):

1. Sea ice in the regional and global climate: past, present, and future variability and change of sea ice and climate on various scales, including observations, attribution and prediction, feedbacks, extreme events, polar–midlatitude linkages, Arctic–Antarctic contrasts;
2. Sea-ice processes and ocean–ice–atmosphere interaction: sea-ice mass balance, dynamics versus thermodynamics, ocean heat flux, surface energy balance;
3. Snow on sea ice: snow thickness, density, thermal and microwave properties, metamorphism, redistribution;
4. Physical properties of sea ice: from the microscopic to the macroscopic, optics, ice mechanics;
5. Sea ice ecology and biogeochemistry: from microorganisms to fish and marine mammals, primary productivity, ecosystem change, particulate and dissolved organic matter, carbon cycle, gas fluxes, aerosols, bio-physical interactions and feedbacks;
6. Methodological advances, coupling and upscaling in sea ice studies: Remote sensing, autonomous observations and vehicles, instrumental advances, newdata products, coupling sea-ice modelling with observations, advances innumerical parameterizations;
7. Humans and sea ice: Indigenous sea ice knowledge and use, community-based monitoring programmes, shipping and resource development in ice-covered waters, ice management, information systems, adaptation and mitigation.
   

If you wish to attend the Symposium, please register your interest online at https://www.igsoc.org/symposia/2023/bremerhaven2023