Modified CanSIPS Seasonal Sea Ice Hindcasts and Forecasts

The Modified Canadian Seasonal to Interannual Prediction System (Mod-CanSIPS) is an experimental set of historical forecasts (hindcasts) and pseudo-operational forecasts of Arctic sea ice. These predictions improve in many regards upon the sea ice predictions of standard CanSIPS through various improvements made to sea ice initial conditions. Pseudo-operational forecasts from Mod-CanSIPS have been used to provide sea ice forecasts for the Sea Ice Outlook (https://www.arcus.org/sipn/sea-ice-outlook) in the spring and summer of 2017, 2018 and 2019, as well as for the Arctic Climate Forum (https://arctic-rcc.org/acf) for the spring and fall of 2018 and 2019. The extensive set of hindcasts have been used for research purposes (e.g. evaluating predictive skill), and to serve as a basis for bias correction and calibration of real-time forecasts.