The Novaya Zemlya Bora and its impact on Barents Sea air‐sea interaction

Abstract

Novaya Zemlya is a mountainous archipelago in the Eastern Arctic. Weather station data indicates that southeasterly high‐speed winds are frequent, especially during the winter. Although it has been proposed that a bora is responsible for these winds, there has been no quantitative analysis of the flow in the region. Here we present the first high‐resolution climatology of the three‐dimensional wind field near Novaya Zemlya. The high‐speed wind events are shown to share many characteristics with bora as well as models of downslope windstorms. The highest wind speeds occur where Barents Sea dense water is observed to form, and we show that there is a doubling in the turbulent heat transfer from the ocean to the atmosphere during bora. It is argued that the bora plays an important role in the transformation of the Atlantic water that passes by the archipelago en route to the central Arctic Ocean.

A comparison of the regional Arctic System Reanalysis and the global ERA‐Interim Reanalysis for the Arctic

“…The ASRv1 benefits from a regional assimilation of high‐latitude observations and higher horizontal and vertical resolutions. Already the improvements in ASRv1 to the wind fields have proven beneficial for Arctic studies, including detailed depictions of processes responsible for wind events near Novaya Zemlya (Moore, ) as well as the life cycle, intensity, and regional development climatology of Arctic cyclones (Tilinina et al , ). This research demonstrates the potential for the ASR to provide important information regarding not only Arctic climate but also meteorological processes that are helpful for forecasting in this region.…”

Circulation in the northwest Laptev Sea in the eastern Arctic Ocean: Crossroads between Siberian River water, Atlantic water and polynya‐formed dense water

“…This occurred on scales too small to be resolved by global reanalysis products, which implies that coarsely resolved models underestimate ocean circulation and heat fluxes during storm events and hence underlines the need for high‐resolution studies in dynamic areas such as the northwest Laptev Sea. Similar conclusions were reached for other high‐latitude regions, such as around Greenland [ Moore et al ., ] and Novaya Zemlya [ Moore , ].…”

The climatological distribution of extreme Arctic winds and implications for ocean and sea ice processes

“…Despite WRF50 being driven at its lateral boundaries by ERA‐I, its wind speed statistics are most comparable to those from CFSR, which suggests that WRF50 and CFSR's similar horizontal grid spacing (50 km in WRF50 and 0.5° in CFSR) is playing some role in determining the magnitude of extreme winds in these data sets. Because of limited observational data, it is unclear whether the extremely large wind speeds seen off the coast of Greenland and in the northern Barents Sea in COREv2 are realistic; although given its absence in the other data sets and evidence from other work [e.g., Moore , ], we are dubious of those in the northern Barents Sea.…”

“…Although COREv2 is a blended product—and over open ocean its winds are highly constrained by the scatterometer data—both the Barents Sea region and Denmark Strait lie along the marginal ice zone and are largely ice covered in wintertime, the season with largest wind speeds [ Kolstad , ], making it difficult to know if these extremely large wind speed values are realistic or an artifact of the blending of reanalysis and QuikSCAT wind data in the COREv2 product. Moore [] identified a mechanism for strong winds off the coast of Novaya Zemlya (Figure : Nov. Zem.)…”