Evaluating Impacts of Recent Arctic Sea Ice Loss on the Northern Hemisphere Winter Climate Change

• Published in: Geophysical Research Letters
• Main Authors: Ogawa, Fumiaki, Keenlyside, Noel, Gao, Yongqi, Koenigk, Torben, Yang, Shuting, Suo, Lingling, Wang, Tao, Gastineau, Guillaume, Nakamura, Tetsu, Cheung, Ho, Nam, Omrani, Nour-Eddine, Ukita, Jinro, Semenov, Vladimir, V.
• Other Authors: Geophysical Institute Bergen (GFI / BiU), University of Bergen (UiB), Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center Bergen (NERSC), Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research (BCCR), Department of Biological Sciences Bergen (BIO / UiB), University of Bergen (UiB)-University of Bergen (UiB), Nansen-Zhu International Research Center, Institute of Atmospheric Physics Beijing (IAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing (CAS)-Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing (CAS), Océan et variabilité du climat (VARCLIM), Laboratoire d'Océanographie et du Climat : Expérimentations et Approches Numériques (LOCEAN), Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN)-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut Pierre-Simon-Laplace (IPSL (FR_636)), École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL), Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)-Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-École polytechnique (X)-Centre National d'Études Spatiales Toulouse (CNES)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Paris Cité (UPCité)-École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL), Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)-Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-École polytechnique (X)-Centre National d'Études Spatiales Toulouse (CNES)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Paris Cité (UPCité)-Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN)-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut Pierre-Simon-Laplace (IPSL (FR_636)), Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)-Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-École polytechnique (X)-Centre National d'Études Spatiales Toulouse (CNES)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Paris Cité (UPCité), Hokkaido University Sapporo, Japan, Niigata University, A.M.Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow (RAS), NordForsk GREENICE project (Project 61841), European Project: 648982,H2020,ERC-2014-CoG,STERCP(2015)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2018
• Subjects: [SDU.STU.CL]Sciences of the Universe [physics]/Earth Sciences/Climatology; [SDU.STU.GL]Sciences of the Universe [physics]/Earth Sciences/Glaciology; Arctic; Climate change; Global warming; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/hal-01830133; https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/hal-01830133/document; https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/hal-01830133/file/Ogawa_et_al-2018-Geophysical_Research_Letters.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076502

International audience Understanding the mechanism governing the ongoing global warming is a major challenge facing our society and its sustainable growth. Together with the CO 2 -forced warming, the concurrent polar sea ice loss might also have contributed to the observed Arctic warming amplification and also to the cooling trends over Eurasia through a dynamical teleconnection. However, previous individual modeling studies suggest widely different findings on the role of sea ice loss in Northern Hemisphere climate change. To help resolve this controversy, we used satellite-derived sea ice and sea-surface temperature to run coordinated hindcast experiments with five different atmospheric general circulation models. The multimodel ensemble-mean results presented in the paper reduce biases of each model and eliminate atmospheric internal unforced variability, and thus provide the best estimate to date of the signal of the polar sea ice loss. The results suggest that the impact of sea ice seems critical for the Arctic surface temperature changes, but the temperature trends elsewhere seem rather due to either sea-surface temperature changes or atmospheric internal variability. They give clear guidance on how to provide society with more accurate climate change attributions. Our work is of interest to stakeholders of countries in the Northern Hemisphere middle and high latitudes.