Atmospheric Warming Drives Growth in Arctic Sea Ice: A Key Role for Snow
A number of feedbacks regulate the response of Arctic sea ice to local atmospheric warming. Using a realistic coupled ocean‐sea ice model and its adjoint, we isolate a mechanism by which significant ice growth at the end of the melt season may occur as a lagged response to Arctic atmospheric warming...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:7685162 2023-05-15T14:49:36+02:00 Atmospheric Warming Drives Growth in Arctic Sea Ice: A Key Role for Snow Bigdeli, A. Nguyen, A. T. Pillar, H. R. Ocaña, V. Heimbach, P. 2020-10-24 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685162/ https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL090236 en eng John Wiley and Sons Inc. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685162/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2020GL090236 ©2020. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. CC-BY Geophys Res Lett Research Letters Text 2020 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL090236 2020-12-06T01:40:30Z A number of feedbacks regulate the response of Arctic sea ice to local atmospheric warming. Using a realistic coupled ocean‐sea ice model and its adjoint, we isolate a mechanism by which significant ice growth at the end of the melt season may occur as a lagged response to Arctic atmospheric warming. A series of perturbation simulations informed by adjoint model‐derived sensitivity patterns reveal the enhanced ice growth to be accompanied by a reduction of snow thickness on the ice pack. Detailed analysis of ocean‐ice‐snow heat budgets confirms the essential role of the reduced snow thickness for persistence and delayed overshoot of ice growth. The underlying mechanism is a snow‐melt‐conductivity feedback, wherein atmosphere‐driven snow melt leads to a larger conductive ocean heat loss through the overlying ice layer. Our results highlight the need for accurate observations of snow thickness to constrain climate models and to initialize sea ice forecasts. Text Arctic ice pack Sea ice PubMed Central (PMC) Arctic Geophysical Research Letters 47 20 |
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Research Letters |
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Research Letters Bigdeli, A. Nguyen, A. T. Pillar, H. R. Ocaña, V. Heimbach, P. Atmospheric Warming Drives Growth in Arctic Sea Ice: A Key Role for Snow |
topic_facet |
Research Letters |
description |
A number of feedbacks regulate the response of Arctic sea ice to local atmospheric warming. Using a realistic coupled ocean‐sea ice model and its adjoint, we isolate a mechanism by which significant ice growth at the end of the melt season may occur as a lagged response to Arctic atmospheric warming. A series of perturbation simulations informed by adjoint model‐derived sensitivity patterns reveal the enhanced ice growth to be accompanied by a reduction of snow thickness on the ice pack. Detailed analysis of ocean‐ice‐snow heat budgets confirms the essential role of the reduced snow thickness for persistence and delayed overshoot of ice growth. The underlying mechanism is a snow‐melt‐conductivity feedback, wherein atmosphere‐driven snow melt leads to a larger conductive ocean heat loss through the overlying ice layer. Our results highlight the need for accurate observations of snow thickness to constrain climate models and to initialize sea ice forecasts. |
format |
Text |
author |
Bigdeli, A. Nguyen, A. T. Pillar, H. R. Ocaña, V. Heimbach, P. |
author_facet |
Bigdeli, A. Nguyen, A. T. Pillar, H. R. Ocaña, V. Heimbach, P. |
author_sort |
Bigdeli, A. |
title |
Atmospheric Warming Drives Growth in Arctic Sea Ice: A Key Role for Snow |
title_short |
Atmospheric Warming Drives Growth in Arctic Sea Ice: A Key Role for Snow |
title_full |
Atmospheric Warming Drives Growth in Arctic Sea Ice: A Key Role for Snow |
title_fullStr |
Atmospheric Warming Drives Growth in Arctic Sea Ice: A Key Role for Snow |
title_full_unstemmed |
Atmospheric Warming Drives Growth in Arctic Sea Ice: A Key Role for Snow |
title_sort |
atmospheric warming drives growth in arctic sea ice: a key role for snow |
publisher |
John Wiley and Sons Inc. |
publishDate |
2020 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685162/ https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL090236 |
geographic |
Arctic |
geographic_facet |
Arctic |
genre |
Arctic ice pack Sea ice |
genre_facet |
Arctic ice pack Sea ice |
op_source |
Geophys Res Lett |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685162/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2020GL090236 |
op_rights |
©2020. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
op_rightsnorm |
CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL090236 |
container_title |
Geophysical Research Letters |
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47 |
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20 |
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1766320677658296320 |