Record winter winds in 2020/21 drove exceptional Arctic sea ice transport

Mallett, Robbie; Stroeve, Julienne; Cornish, Sam; Crawford, Alex D.; Lukovich, Jennifer V.; Barrett, A. P.; Meier, Walter N.; Heorton, Harry

doi:10.1038/s43247-021-00221-8

Cited by 24 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…However, increasing MYI loss in the Beaufort Sea limits the potential of the Gyre to retain MYI and facilitate a recovery. As an example, during winter 2021, a strong Beaufort High advected MYI out of the central Arctic into the Beaufort Sea (Mallett et al, 2021), and while this facilitated a slight recovery in the regional MYI area (Figure 2a), over 170,000 km 2 of this MYI was lost (Figure 2e) and we speculate that the remaining MYI was heavily deteriorated.…”

Section: Has the Beaufort Sea Become An Area Of Myi Export?mentioning

confidence: 94%

Increasing Multiyear Sea Ice Loss in the Beaufort Sea: A New Export Pathway for the Diminishing Multiyear Ice Cover of the Arctic Ocean

Babb

Galley

Howell

et al. 2022

Geophysical Research Letters

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Multiyear sea ice (MYI) comprises the thickest and most robust sea ice in the Arctic; however, its extent is declining as the Arctic transitions to a predominantly seasonal ice cover (Figure 1; Kwok, 2018). During the 1950s and 1960s, MYI covered the vast majority of the Arctic Ocean (∼5.5 × 10 6 km 2 ; Nghiem et al., 2007) and grew thicker as it circulated through the anticyclonic Beaufort Gyre for up to and beyond 10 years (Rigor & Wallace, 2004). Within the Gyre, MYI is transported from the central Arctic, where the thickest and oldest ice is compressed against the northern coast of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA; Bourke & Garret, 1987;Kwok, 2015), through the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, then onward to the Eastern Arctic. From there MYI is circulated northwards and either retained and recirculated within the Gyre or entrained in the Transpolar Drift Stream and exported through the Fram Strait (Figure 1). The retention of MYI within the Gyre is a critical factor in the mass balance of the Arctic Ocean, as it redistributes MYI throughout the Arctic, maintaining the pan-Arctic distribution of MYI observed throughout the second half of the twentieth century (Nghiem et al., 2007) and the start of the observational record in the 1980s (Figure 1a; Maslanik et al., 2011). MYI survival through the Beaufort Sea is key to the process of MYI redistribution because the Beaufort serves as a conduit connecting the central Arctic to the Eastern Arctic. Maslanik et al. (2011) showed that between 1981 and 2005, 93% of MYI in the Beaufort Sea survived through summer, which thereby fostered the redistribution of MYI through the Gyre.

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Section: Has the Beaufort Sea Become An Area Of Myi Export?mentioning

confidence: 94%

Increasing Multiyear Sea Ice Loss in the Beaufort Sea: A New Export Pathway for the Diminishing Multiyear Ice Cover of the Arctic Ocean

Babb

Galley

Howell

et al. 2022

Geophysical Research Letters

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“…The warming trend observed and modelled is three times as fast in the Arctic as the global average, 5 due in part to a phenomenon called ''Arctic amplification''. This increasing surface air temperature is caused by sea-ice loss in the Arctic Ocean (Dai et al 2019) that reached record levels in 2020/2021 due to increased ice export caused by high winds (Mallett et al 2021). Arctic amplification can force regional responses in midlatitude weather (Cohen et al 2019) demonstrating the global connectivity and importance of the Arctic and Siberia.…”

Section: The Diversity and Complexity Of Climate Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Siberia has global importance for its feedbacks to the climate system. These include Siberian seas that are losing sea ice (Mallett et al 2021) leading to ocean warming and increased storms-and even impacts on mid-latitude weather. The feedbacks also include methane emissions from the continental shelves (Kosmach et al 2015) and from permafrost, particularly in Western Siberia (Anisimov and Zimov 2021).…”

Section: Global Societal Consequences Of Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Siberian environmental change: Synthesis of recent studies and opportunities for networking

Callaghan

Shaduyko

Kirpotin

et al. 2021

Ambio

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A recent multidisciplinary compilation of studies on changes in the Siberian environment details how climate is changing faster than most places on Earth with exceptional warming in the north and increased aridity in the south. Impacts of these changes are rapid permafrost thaw and melt of glaciers, increased flooding, extreme weather events leading to sudden changes in biodiversity, increased forest fires, more insect pest outbreaks, and increased emissions of CO 2 and methane. These trends interact with sociological changes leading to land-use change, globalisation of diets, impaired health of Arctic Peoples, and challenges for transport. Local mitigation and adaptation measures are likely to be limited by a range of public perceptions of climate change that vary according to personal background. However, Siberia has the possibility through land surface feedbacks to amplify or suppress climate change impacts at potentially global levels. Based on the diverse studies presented in this Ambio Special Issue, we suggest ways forward for more sustainable environmental research and management. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-021-01626-7.

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“…10 we compute the link weights using the entire observational period , where we notice a very strong anti-correlation between the winter AO and summer sea ice in the East Siberian Sea across all observational products (standardising the link weight for this node produces correlation coefficients of −0.65, −0.57, and −0.66 for the NASA Team, Bootstrap and OSI-SAF data sets respectively). Furthermore, The reverse of sign in the Canada basin may not be significant given the moderate degree of positive correlation between 1979-1999, however the strong negative correlation between 2000-2020 implies that positive AO winters (anomalously low sea-level pressure) now typically lead to anomalously low summer sea ice concentration anomalies across both the eastern and western Arctic, whereas previously this typically only occurred in the eastern Arctic (see also Mallett et al 2021 for a recent investigation of this changing relationship). It is also worth noting that summer sea ice in the Atlantic sector has generally remained positively correlated with the winter AO over both halves of the observational period -see Sect.…”

Section: Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Network connectivity between the winter Arctic Oscillation and summer sea ice in CMIP6 models and observations

Gregory

Stroeve

2022

Preprint

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Abstract. The indirect effect of winter Arctic Oscillation (AO) events on the proceeding summer Arctic sea ice extent suggests an inherent winter-to-summer mechanism for sea ice predictability. On the other hand, operational regional summer sea ice forecasts in a large number of coupled climate models show a considerable drop in predictive skill for forecasts initialised prior to the date of melt onset in spring, suggesting that some drivers of sea ice variability on longer time scales may not be well represented in these models. To this end, we introduce an unsupervised learning approach based on cluster analysis and complex networks to establish how well the latest generation of coupled climate models participating in phase 6 of the World Climate Research Programme Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) are able to reflect the spatio-temporal patterns of variability in northern-hemisphere winter sea-level pressure and Arctic summer sea ice concentration over the period 1979–2020, relative to ERA5 atmospheric reanalysis and satellite-derived sea ice observations respectively. Two specific global metrics are introduced as ways to compare patterns of variability between models and observations/reanalysis: the Adjusted Rand Index – a method for comparing spatial patterns of variability, and a network distance metric – a method for comparing the degree of connectivity between two geographic regions. We find that CMIP6 models generally reflect the spatial pattern of variability of the AO relatively well, although over-estimate the magnitude of sea-level pressure variability over the north-western Pacific Ocean, and under-estimate the variability over the north Africa and southern Europe. They also under-estimate the importance of regions such as the Beaufort, East Siberian and Laptev seas in explaining pan-Arctic summer sea ice area variability, which we hypothesise is due to regional biases in sea ice thickness. Finally, observations show that historically, winter AO events (negatively) covary strongly with summer sea ice concentration in the eastern Pacific sector of the Arctic, although now under a thinning ice regime, both the eastern and western Pacific sectors exhibit similar behaviour. CMIP6 models however do not show this transition on average, which may hinder their ability to make skilful seasonal to inter-annual predictions of summer sea ice.

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Record winter winds in 2020/21 drove exceptional Arctic sea ice transport

Cited by 24 publications

References 18 publications

Increasing Multiyear Sea Ice Loss in the Beaufort Sea: A New Export Pathway for the Diminishing Multiyear Ice Cover of the Arctic Ocean

Increasing Multiyear Sea Ice Loss in the Beaufort Sea: A New Export Pathway for the Diminishing Multiyear Ice Cover of the Arctic Ocean

Siberian environmental change: Synthesis of recent studies and opportunities for networking

Network connectivity between the winter Arctic Oscillation and summer sea ice in CMIP6 models and observations

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