International audienceWe develop, calibrate and test a dataset intended to drive global ocean hindcasts simulations of the last five decades. This dataset provides surface meteorological variables needed to estimate air-sea fluxes and is built from 6-hourly surface atmospheric state variables of ERA40. We first compare the raw fields of ERA40 to the CORE.v1 dataset of Large and Yeager (2004), used here as a reference, and discuss our choice to use daily radiative fluxes and monthly precipitation products extracted from satellite data rather than their ERA40 counterparts. Both datasets lead to excessively high global imbalances of heat and freshwater fluxes when tested with a prescribed climatological sea surface temperature. After identifying unrealistic time discontinuities (induced by changes in the nature of assimilated observations) and obvious global and regional biases in ERA40 fields (by comparison to high quality observations), we propose a set of corrections. Tropical surface air humidity is decreased from 1979 onward, representation of Arctic surface air temperature is improved using recent observations and the wind is globally increased. These corrections lead to a significant decrease of the excessive positive global imbalance of heat. Radiation and precipitation fields are then submitted to a small adjustment (in zonal mean) that yields a near-zero global imbalance of heat and freshwater. A set of 47-year-long simulations is carried out with the coarse-resolution (2° × 2°) version of the NEMO OGCM to assess the sensitivity of the model to the proposed corrections. Model results show that each of the proposed correction contributes to improve the representation of central features of the global ocean circulation

The Arctic climate change is analyzed in an ensemble of future projection simulations performed with the global coupled climate model EC-Earth2.3. EC-Earth simulates the twentieth century Arctic climate relatively well but the Arctic is about 2 K too cold and the sea ice thickness and extent are overestimated. In the twenty-first century, the results show a continuation and strengthening of the Arctic trends observed over the recent decades, which leads to a dramatically changed Arctic climate, especially in the high emission scenario RCP8.5. The annually averaged Arctic mean near-surface temperature increases by 12 K in RCP8.5, with largest warming in the Barents Sea region. The warming is most pronounced in winter and autumn and in the lower atmosphere. The Arctic winter temperature inversion is reduced in all scenarios and disappears in RCP8.5. The Arctic becomes ice free in September in all RCP8.5 simulations after a rapid reduction event without recovery around year 2060. Taking into account the overestimation of ice in the twentieth century, our model results indicate a likely ice-free Arctic in September around 2040. Sea ice reductions are most pronounced in the Barents Sea in all RCPs, which lead to the most dramatic changes in this region. Here, surface heat fluxes are strongly enhanced and the cloudiness is substantially decreased. The meridional heat flux into the Arctic is reduced in the atmosphere but increases in the ocean. This oceanic increase is dominated by an enhanced heat flux into the Barents Sea, which strongly contributes to the large sea ice reduction and surface-air warming in this region. Increased precipitation and river runoff lead to more freshwater input into the Arctic Ocean. However, most of the additional freshwater is stored in the Arctic Ocean while the total Arctic freshwater export only slightly increases.