Extremes of summer Arctic sea ice reduction investigated with a rare event algorithm ...

• Main Authors: Sauer, Jerome, Demaeyer, Jonathan, Zappa, Giuseppe, Massonnet, François, Ragone, Francesco
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2023
• Subjects: Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics physics.ao-ph; FOS Physical sciences; Arctic; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2308.09984; https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09984

Various studies identified possible drivers of extremes of Arctic sea ice reduction, such as observed in the summers of 2007 and 2012, including preconditioning, local feedback mechanisms, oceanic heat transport and the synoptic- and large-scale atmospheric circulations. However, a robust quantitative statistical analysis of extremes of sea ice reduction is hindered by the small number of events that can be sampled in observations and numerical simulations with computationally expensive climate models. Recent studies tackled the problem of sampling climate extremes by using rare event algorithms, i.e., computational techniques developed in statistical physics to reduce the computational cost required to sample rare events in numerical simulations. Here we apply a rare event algorithm to ensemble simulations with the intermediate complexity coupled climate model PlaSim-LSG to investigate extreme negative summer pan-Arctic sea ice area anomalies under pre-industrial greenhouse gas conditions. Owing to the ...