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Dramatic Arctic warming- 30 degrees above average, ice at record low

“Arctic ice loss driven by natural swings, not just mankind: study”

Guest post by David Middleton From the No Schist, Sherlock files… The “record low wintertime maximum extent” still looks pretty icy. By Alister Doyle | OSLO Natural swings in the Arctic climate have caused up to half the precipitous losses of sea ice around the North Pole in recent decades, with the rest driven by…
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[h=4]NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | ARTICLE[/h]
[h=3]Influence of high-latitude atmospheric circulation changes on summertime Arctic sea ice[/h]Qinghua Ding, Axel Schweiger, Michelle L’Heureux, David S. Battisti, Stephen Po-Chedley, Nathaniel C. Johnson, Eduardo Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, Kirstin Harnos, Qin Zhang, Ryan Eastman & Eric J. Steig
Nature Climate Change (2017) doi:10.1038/nclimate3241
Received 26 July 2016 Accepted 03 February 2017 Published online 13 March 2017

The Arctic has seen rapid sea-ice decline in the past three decades, whilst warming at about twice the global average rate. Yet the relationship between Arctic warming and sea-ice loss is not well understood. Here, we present evidence that trends in summertime atmospheric circulation may have contributed as much as 60% to the September sea-ice extent decline since 1979. A tendency towards a stronger anticyclonic circulation over Greenland and the Arctic Ocean with a barotropic structure in the troposphere increased the downwelling longwave radiation above the ice by warming and moistening the lower troposphere. Model experiments, with reanalysis data constraining atmospheric circulation, replicate the observed thermodynamic response and indicate that the near-surface changes are dominated by circulation changes rather than feedbacks from the changing sea-ice cover. Internal variability dominates the Arctic summer circulation trend and may be responsible for about 30–50% of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979.



Nature Climate Change

 
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