Evaluating sea ice thickness simulation is critical for projecting a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean
Abstract The rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, including sea ice area (SIA) retreat and sea ice thinning, is a striking manifestation of global climate change. Analysis of 40 CMIP6 models reveals a very large spread in both model simulations of the September SIA and thickness and the timing of a summ...
Published in: | Environmental Research Letters |
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crioppubl:10.1088/1748-9326/ac9d4d 2024-09-15T17:53:27+00:00 Evaluating sea ice thickness simulation is critical for projecting a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean Zhou, Xiao Wang, Bin Huang, Fei National Natural Science Foundation of China National Key Scientific Research Program of China National Science Foundation 2022 http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac9d4d https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac9d4d https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac9d4d/pdf unknown IOP Publishing http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://iopscience.iop.org/info/page/text-and-data-mining Environmental Research Letters volume 17, issue 11, page 114033 ISSN 1748-9326 journal-article 2022 crioppubl https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac9d4d 2024-08-26T04:19:30Z Abstract The rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, including sea ice area (SIA) retreat and sea ice thinning, is a striking manifestation of global climate change. Analysis of 40 CMIP6 models reveals a very large spread in both model simulations of the September SIA and thickness and the timing of a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean. The existing SIA-based evaluation metrics are deficient due to observational uncertainty, prominent internal variability, and indirect Arctic response to global forcing. Given the critical roles of sea ice thickness (SIT) in determining Arctic ice variation throughout the seasonal cycle and the April SIT bridging the winter freezing and summer melting processes, we propose two SIT-based metrics, the April mean SIT and summer SIA response to April SIT, to assess climate models’ capability to reproduce the historical change of the Arctic sea ice area. The selected 11 good models reduce the uncertainty in the projected first ice-free Arctic by 70% relative to 11 poor models. The chosen models’ ensemble mean projects the first ice-free year in 2049 (2043) under the shared socio-economic pathways (SSP)2-4.5 (SSP5-8.5) scenario with one standard deviation of the inter-model spread of 12.0 (8.9) years. Article in Journal/Newspaper Arctic Ocean Climate change Sea ice IOP Publishing Environmental Research Letters 17 11 114033 |
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Abstract The rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, including sea ice area (SIA) retreat and sea ice thinning, is a striking manifestation of global climate change. Analysis of 40 CMIP6 models reveals a very large spread in both model simulations of the September SIA and thickness and the timing of a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean. The existing SIA-based evaluation metrics are deficient due to observational uncertainty, prominent internal variability, and indirect Arctic response to global forcing. Given the critical roles of sea ice thickness (SIT) in determining Arctic ice variation throughout the seasonal cycle and the April SIT bridging the winter freezing and summer melting processes, we propose two SIT-based metrics, the April mean SIT and summer SIA response to April SIT, to assess climate models’ capability to reproduce the historical change of the Arctic sea ice area. The selected 11 good models reduce the uncertainty in the projected first ice-free Arctic by 70% relative to 11 poor models. The chosen models’ ensemble mean projects the first ice-free year in 2049 (2043) under the shared socio-economic pathways (SSP)2-4.5 (SSP5-8.5) scenario with one standard deviation of the inter-model spread of 12.0 (8.9) years. |
author2 |
National Natural Science Foundation of China National Key Scientific Research Program of China National Science Foundation |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Zhou, Xiao Wang, Bin Huang, Fei |
spellingShingle |
Zhou, Xiao Wang, Bin Huang, Fei Evaluating sea ice thickness simulation is critical for projecting a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean |
author_facet |
Zhou, Xiao Wang, Bin Huang, Fei |
author_sort |
Zhou, Xiao |
title |
Evaluating sea ice thickness simulation is critical for projecting a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean |
title_short |
Evaluating sea ice thickness simulation is critical for projecting a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean |
title_full |
Evaluating sea ice thickness simulation is critical for projecting a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean |
title_fullStr |
Evaluating sea ice thickness simulation is critical for projecting a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean |
title_full_unstemmed |
Evaluating sea ice thickness simulation is critical for projecting a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean |
title_sort |
evaluating sea ice thickness simulation is critical for projecting a summer ice-free arctic ocean |
publisher |
IOP Publishing |
publishDate |
2022 |
url |
http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac9d4d https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac9d4d https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac9d4d/pdf |
genre |
Arctic Ocean Climate change Sea ice |
genre_facet |
Arctic Ocean Climate change Sea ice |
op_source |
Environmental Research Letters volume 17, issue 11, page 114033 ISSN 1748-9326 |
op_rights |
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://iopscience.iop.org/info/page/text-and-data-mining |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac9d4d |
container_title |
Environmental Research Letters |
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17 |
container_issue |
11 |
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114033 |
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1810295555802267648 |