Brief communication: Antarctic sea ice gain does not compensate for increased solar absorption from Arctic ice loss

• Main Authors: Katlein, Christian, Hendricks, Stefan, Key, Jeffrey
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Arctic; Antarctic; The Antarctic; albedo; Antarc*; Sea ice; The Cryosphere; The Cryosphere Discussions
• Online Access: https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/43048/; https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/43048/1/tc-2016-279.pdf; https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2016-279; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.49588; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.49588.d001

Here we show on the basis of the new consistent long-term observational dataset APP-x, that the observed increase of sea ice extent in the Antarctic cannot compensate for the loss of Arctic sea ice in terms of the shortwave radiation budget in the polar oceans poleward of 50° latitude. The observations show, that apart from retreating sea-ice additional effects like albedo changes and especially changing cloud coverage lead to a total increase of solar shortwave energy deposited into the polar oceans despite of the marginal increase in Antarctic winter sea ice extent.