Characteristics of Arctic storms and their influence on surface climate

• Main Author: Yang, Yang
• Other Authors: Zhang, Xiangdong, Danielson, Seth, Fochesatto, Javier, Hock, Regine
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: storms; Arctic regions; storm winds; sea ice; Arctic; Bering Strait; Chukchi Sea; East Siberian Sea; Fairbanks; Greenland; Pacific; Beaufort Sea; Chukchi; laptev; Sea ice; Alaska
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11122/11301

Dissertation (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2020 Impacts of intense synoptic storms on Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea surface environmental conditions are examined, focusing on storms moving into the regions with northward and eastward pathways. Both storms alter the prevailing northeasterly wind to southerly and southwesterly wind. The storms moving from the East Siberian Sea that follow a west to east route are most active in summer and have the longest duration. Increasing southwesterly wind plays a key role in the decline of thin sea ice within the warm season. Storms traveling from the relatively warm Pacific Ocean into the Arctic over the Bering Strait are more common in winter, and are typically more intense than the summer storms that propagate west to east. Downward longwave radiation increases considerably with the passage of intense winter storms over the ice-covered Chukchi Sea; the sea ice concentration decreases accordingly. The impact of different sea ice conditions on Arctic synoptic storm systems in autumn are investigated in the North Pacific and Atlantic sectors, based on the ten ensembles of hindcast simulations from coupled regional climate model HIRHAM-NAOSIM. In both the Pacific and Atlantic sectors, greater transfers of heat and moisture fluxes from the open ocean to the atmosphere occur in low sea ice years than in high sea ice years. The largest increase of upward heat fluxes and baroclinicity occurs over the Laptev, southern Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in the Pacific sector, and over the southern Greenland and Barents Seas in the Atlantic sector. Enhanced baroclinity plays a dominant role in the development of intense storm systems. Therefore, storms in reduced sea ice years are more intense than in enhanced sea ice years in both Atlantic and Pacific sectors. The storm count also increases over locations exhibiting high baroclinicity. Sea ice volume anomalies are significantly correlated with synoptic storm counts based on maximum covariance analysis (MCA) leading modes of ...