Climatic Overview of NAFO Subarea 1, 1991–2000

• Main Author: M. Stein
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Fyllas Bank; Greenland; Nuuk; Cape Farewell; Egedesminde; North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.539.8263; http://journal.nafo.int/34/stein/3-stein.pdf

Based on climatological data on air temperatures, sea ice cover, as well as on subsurface oceano-graphic time series and historic data from World Ocean Data Centre A (WDC-A), this paper analyses the climatic conditions off West Greenland during the decade of the 1990s and compares them with previous decades. The 1990s was a decade of extremes. The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index flipped from one of its most positive values in winter 1995 to one of its most negative the following winter and reached a high level again during the last winter of the decade. Air temperatures at Nuuk tended to follow these extremes, e.g. during the high NAO Index in the early-1990s, there were very cold air temperatures at West Greenland. Approximately 50 % of the variance in winter temperatures at Nuuk can be explained by air pressure changes over the North Atlantic. Nuuk air temperatures are shown to be representative of the climatic variability over the west coast of West Greenland from Cape Farewell in the south to Egedesminde in the Disko Bight area. There is significant correlation between the area-weighted mean bottom water temperature index for the German groundfish survey area off East and West Greenland and the autumn time series data from Fyllas Bank station 4 for the corresponding depth layers 0–200 m and 200–400 m. Accordingly, the subsurface oceanic variability