In February 2016, the Global Model Test Bed (GMTB) organized the NGGPS Sea Ice Modeling Workshop to make recommendations on the sea ice component to be used in the NCEP Unified Global Coupled System (UGCS), currently being developed under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Next-Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS). As described in the workshop final report , given that the use of a community-contributed and supported model in UGCS was raised as a priority for model selection, participants recommended the tentative adoption of The Los Alamos Sea Ice model (CICE), pending follow-up testing and addressing concerns raised regarding model governance and differences in staggering between the grids used in the UGCS ocean models and CICE.

In this test, CICE was run in standalone mode, with initialization and forcing prescribed using the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Forecast System v2 (CFSv2). Month-long retrospective forecasts were initialized on the first day of each month in 2015, and results were compared against the CFSv2 analyses.