| Summary: | Dissertation (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2019 Recent studies have shown that intense and long-lasting storms potentially facilitate sea ice melting. Under the background of extratropical storm tracks poleward shift, significant reductions of Arctic sea ice coverage, and thinning of sea ice thickness over the last several decades, a better understanding on how storms impact sea ice mass balance is obviously of great importance to better predict future sea ice and the Arctic climate changes. This thesis presents a multi-scale study on how storms impact sea ice, consisting of three different parts of the effort. In the first part, we examined the impacts of the 2016 summer intense storm on sea ice changes over the Chukchi Sea using ship-borne observations. The results show that the intense storm can accelerate ice melt through enhanced upper-ocean mixing and upward heat transport. The satellite-observed long-term sea ice variations potentially can be impacted by many factors. In the second part, we first explore key physical processes controlling sea ice changes under no-storm condition. We examined and compared results from 25 sensitivity experiments using the NCAR's Community Earth System Model (CESM). We found that sea ice volume, velocity, and thickness are highly sensitive to perturbed air-ice momentum flux and sea ice strength. Increased sea ice strength or decreased air-ice momentum flux causes counter-clockwise rotation of the transpolar drift, resulting in an increase in sea ice export through Fram Strait and therefore reduction of the pan-Arctic sea ice thickness. Following four tracers released over the Arctic, we found the sea ice thickness distributions following those tracers are broader over the western Arctic and becomes narrower over the eastern Arctic. Additionally, thermodynamic processes are more dominant controlling sea ice thickness variations, especially over periphery seas. Over the eastern Arctic, dynamic processes play a more important role in controlling sea ice thickness ...
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