scholarly journals Evolution of Arctic sea ice concentration trends and the role of atmospheric circulation forcing, 1979–2007

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Clara Deser ◽  
Haiyan Teng
2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 6515-6549 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Klein ◽  
H. Goosse ◽  
A. Mairesse ◽  
A. de Vernal

Abstract. The consistency between a new quantitative reconstruction of Arctic sea-ice concentration based on dinocyst assemblages and the results of climate models has been investigated for the mid-Holocene. The comparison shows that the simulated sea-ice changes are weaker and spatially more homogeneous than the recorded ones. Furthermore, although the model-data agreement is relatively good in some regions such as the Labrador Sea, the skill of the models at local scale is low. The response of the models follows mainly the increase in summer insolation at large scale. This is modulated by changes in atmospheric circulation leading to differences between regions in the models that are albeit smaller than in the reconstruction. Performing simulations with data assimilation using the model LOVECLIM amplifies those regional differences, mainly through a reduction of the southward winds in the Barents Sea and an increase in the westerly winds in the Canadian Basin of the Arctic. This leads to an increase in the ice concentration in the Barents and Chukchi Seas and a better agreement with the reconstructions. This underlines the potential role of atmospheric circulation to explain the reconstructed changes during the Holocene.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 1145-1163 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Klein ◽  
H. Goosse ◽  
A. Mairesse ◽  
A. de Vernal

Abstract. The consistency between new quantitative reconstructions of Arctic sea ice concentration based on dinocyst assemblages and the results of climate models has been investigated for the mid-Holocene. The response of the models mainly follows the increase in summer insolation, modulated to a limited extent by changes in atmospheric circulation. This leads to differences between regions in the models that are smaller than in the reconstruction. It is, however, impossible to precisely assess the models' skills because the sea ice concentration changes at the mid-Holocene are small in both the reconstructions and the models and of the same order of magnitude as the reconstruction uncertainty. Performing simulations with data assimilation using the model LOVECLIM amplifies the regional differences and improves the model–data agreement as expected. This is mainly achieved through a reduction of the southward winds in the Barents Sea and an increase in the westerly winds in the Canadian Basin, inducing an increase in the ice concentration in the Barents and Chukchi seas. This underlines the potential role of atmospheric circulation in explaining the reconstructed changes during the Holocene.


2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masayo Ogi ◽  
Ignatius G. Rigor

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):  
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):  
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>


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