Impacts of early autumn Arctic sea ice concentration on subsequent spring Eurasian surface air temperature variations

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 2523-2542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shangfeng Chen ◽  
Renguang Wu
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Semenov ◽  
Tatiana Matveeva

<p>Global warming in the recent decades has been accompanied by a rapid recline of the Arctic sea ice area most pronounced in summer (10% per decade). To understand the relative contribution of external forcing and natural variability to the modern and future sea ice area changes, it is necessary to evaluate a range of long-term variations of the Arctic sea ice area in the period before a significant increase in anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Available observational data on the spatiotemporal dynamics of Arctic sea ice until 1950s are characterized by significant gaps and uncertainties. In the recent years, there have appeared several reconstructions of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century Arctic sea ice area that filled the gaps by analogue methods or utilized combined empirical data and climate model’s output. All of them resulted in a stronger that earlier believed negative sea ice area anomaly in the 1940s concurrent with the early 20<sup>th</sup> century warming (ETCW) peak. In this study, we reconstruct the monthly average gridded sea ice concentration (SIC) in the first half of the 20th century using the relationship between the spatiotemporal features of SIC variability, surface air temperature over the Northern Hemisphere extratropical continents, sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, and sea level pressure. In agreement with a few previous results, our reconstructed data also show a significant negative anomaly of the Arctic sea ice area in the middle of the 20th century, however with some 15% to 30% stronger amplitude, about 1.5 million km<sup>2</sup> in September and 0.7 million km<sup>2</sup> in March. The reconstruction demonstrates a good agreement with regional Arctic sea ice area data when available and suggests that ETWC in the Arctic has been accompanied by a concurrent sea ice area decline of a magnitude that have been exceeded only in the beginning of the 21<sup>st</sup> century.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Heorton ◽  
Michel Tsamados ◽  
Paul Holland ◽  
Jack Landy

<p><span>We combine satellite-derived observations of sea ice concentration, drift, and thickness to provide the first observational decomposition of the dynamic (advection/divergence) and thermodynamic (melt/growth) drivers of wintertime Arctic sea ice volume change. Ten winter growth seasons are analyzed over the CryoSat-2 period between October 2010 and April 2020. Sensitivity to several observational products is performed to provide an estimated uncertainty of the budget calculations. The total thermodynamic ice volume growth and dynamic ice losses are calculated with marked seasonal, inter-annual and regional variations</span><span>. Ice growth is fastest during Autumn, in the Marginal Seas and over first year ice</span><span>. Our budget decomposition methodology can help diagnose the processes confounding climate model predictions of sea ice. We make our product and code available to the community in monthly pan-Arctic netcdft files for the entire October 2010 to April 2020 period.</span></p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francois Massonnet ◽  
Sara Fleury ◽  
Florent Garnier ◽  
Ed Blockley ◽  
Pablo Ortega Montilla ◽  
...  

<p>It is well established that winter and spring Arctic sea-ice thickness anomalies are a key source of predictability for late summer sea-ice concentration. While numerical general circulation models (GCMs) are increasingly used to perform seasonal predictions, they are not systematically taking advantage of the wealth of polar observations available. Data assimilation, the study of how to constrain GCMs to produce a physically consistent state given observations and their uncertainties, remains, therefore, an active area of research in the field of seasonal prediction. With the recent advent of satellite laser and radar altimetry, large-scale estimates of sea-ice thickness have become available for data assimilation in GCMs. However, the sea-ice thickness is never directly observed by altimeters, but rather deduced from the measured sea-ice freeboard (the height of the emerged part of the sea ice floe) based on several assumptions like the depth of snow on sea ice and its density, which are both often poorly estimated. Thus, observed sea-ice thickness estimates are potentially less reliable than sea-ice freeboard estimates. Here, using the EC-Earth3 coupled forecasting system and an ensemble Kalman filter, we perform a set of sensitivity tests to answer the following questions: (1) Does the assimilation of late spring observed sea-ice freeboard or thickness information yield more skilful predictions than no assimilation at all? (2) Should the sea-ice freeboard assimilation be preferred over sea-ice thickness assimilation? (3) Does the assimilation of observed sea-ice concentration provide further constraints on the prediction? We address these questions in the context of a realistic test case, the prediction of 2012 summer conditions, which led to the all-time record low in Arctic sea-ice extent. We finally formulate a set of recommendations for practitioners and future users of sea ice observations in the context of seasonal prediction.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 1642-1649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyhong Park ◽  
Intae Kim ◽  
Jung-Ok Choi ◽  
Youngju Lee ◽  
Jinyoung Jung ◽  
...  

Dimethyl sulfide (DMS) production in the northern Arctic Ocean has been considered to be minimal because of high sea ice concentration and extremely low productivity.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (14) ◽  
pp. 5477-5509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Bushuk ◽  
Dimitrios Giannakis ◽  
Andrew J. Majda

Abstract Arctic sea ice reemergence is a phenomenon in which spring sea ice anomalies are positively correlated with fall anomalies, despite a loss of correlation over the intervening summer months. This work employs a novel data analysis algorithm for high-dimensional multivariate datasets, coupled nonlinear Laplacian spectral analysis (NLSA), to investigate the regional and temporal aspects of this reemergence phenomenon. Coupled NLSA modes of variability of sea ice concentration (SIC), sea surface temperature (SST), and sea level pressure (SLP) are studied in the Arctic sector of a comprehensive climate model and in observations. It is found that low-dimensional families of NLSA modes are able to efficiently reproduce the prominent lagged correlation features of the raw sea ice data. In both the model and observations, these families provide an SST–sea ice reemergence mechanism, in which melt season (spring) sea ice anomalies are imprinted as SST anomalies and stored over the summer months, allowing for sea ice anomalies of the same sign to reappear in the growth season (fall). The ice anomalies of each family exhibit clear phase relationships between the Barents–Kara Seas, the Labrador Sea, and the Bering Sea, three regions that compose the majority of Arctic sea ice variability. These regional phase relationships in sea ice have a natural explanation via the SLP patterns of each family, which closely resemble the Arctic Oscillation and the Arctic dipole anomaly. These SLP patterns, along with their associated geostrophic winds and surface air temperature advection, provide a large-scale teleconnection between different regions of sea ice variability. Moreover, the SLP patterns suggest another plausible ice reemergence mechanism, via their winter-to-winter regime persistence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 521-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leandro Ponsoni ◽  
François Massonnet ◽  
Thierry Fichefet ◽  
Matthieu Chevallier ◽  
David Docquier

Abstract. The ocean–sea ice reanalyses are one of the main sources of Arctic sea ice thickness data both in terms of spatial and temporal resolution, since observations are still sparse in time and space. In this work, we first aim at comparing how the sea ice thickness from an ensemble of 14 reanalyses compares with different sources of observations, such as moored upward-looking sonars, submarines, airbornes, satellites, and ice boreholes. Second, based on the same reanalyses, we intend to characterize the timescales (persistence) and length scales of sea ice thickness anomalies. We investigate whether data assimilation of sea ice concentration by the reanalyses impacts the realism of sea ice thickness as well as its respective timescales and length scales. The results suggest that reanalyses with sea ice data assimilation do not necessarily perform better in terms of sea ice thickness compared with the reanalyses which do not assimilate sea ice concentration. However, data assimilation has a clear impact on the timescales and length scales: reanalyses built with sea ice data assimilation present shorter timescales and length scales. The mean timescales and length scales for reanalyses with data assimilation vary from 2.5 to 5.0 months and 337.0 to 732.5 km, respectively, while reanalyses with no data assimilation are characterized by values from 4.9 to 7.8 months and 846.7 to 935.7 km, respectively.


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