Modeling Recent Climate Variability in the Arctic Ocean,” at The Naval Postgraduate School Modeling Effort (Web site). Naval Postgraduate School

• Main Authors: W. Maslowski, B. Newton, P. Schlosser, A. Semtner, D. Martinson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: 2000]. A boundary between halocline waters with and with; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.462.5980; http://www.oc.nps.edu/sbi/ModelingRecentClimateVariability.pdf

Abstract. Dramatic changes in the circulation of sea ice and the upper layers of the Arctic Ocean have been reported during the last decade. Similar variability is modeled using a regional, coupled ice-ocean model. Realistic atmospheric forcing elds for 1979-93 are the only interannual signal pre-scribed in the model. Our results show large-scale changes in sea ice and oceanic conditions when comparing results for the late 1970s / early 1980s and the 1990s. We hypothesize that these changes are in response to even larger scale atmo-spheric variability in the Northern Hemisphere that can be de ned as either the Arctic Oscillation or the North Atlantic Oscillation. Agreement between the direction and scale of change in the model and observations, in the absence of in-terannual forcing from the global ocean thermohaline circu-lation, suggests that the atmospheric variability by itself is sucient to produce basin-scale changes in the Arctic Ocean and sea ice system. 1.