| Summary: | Snow/ice is a key climate element in the Earth system, which significantly affects surface energy and water balance through a strong snow/ice albedo feedback (SAF). Over the past decade, substantial progress has been made on improving the understanding of SAF over the Northern Hemisphere, particularly under climate change scenarios. However, minimal attention has been paid to quantifying the SAF over the Arctic, a region that is extremely sensitive to global warming. SAF is also an important component in the Arctic amplification. Thus, quantifying the SAF strength in the Arctic allows for a comparable representation of warming responses in the region, especially under the effects of climate change. In this study, SAF is decomposed into the product of two terms, one representing the dependence of net incoming solar radiation on surface albedo and the other representing the change in surface albedo induced by a unit temperature change. The calculations used reanalysis data from the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) from the NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. surface albedo radiative kernels from four widely-used global climate models (GCMs) were utilized to quantify the first term and compared it with the MERRA-2 analysis in order to investigate GCM ability to reproduce the Arctic SAF strength. SAF was analyzed over the different surface types within the Arctic, including ocean with sea ice and land snow/ice/glacier, to quantify their relative contributions.
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