Pacific Ocean inflow : influence on catastrophic reduction of sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean

• Published in: Geophysical Research Letters
• Main Authors: Shimada, Koji, Kamoshida, Takashi, Itoh, Motoyo, Nishino, Shigeto, Carmack, Eddy C., McLaughlin, Fiona A., Zimmermann, Sarah, Proshutinsky, Andrey
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Geophysical Union 2006
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Bering Sea; Canada; Pacific; canada basin; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/3323

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2006. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 33 (2006): L08605, doi:10.1029/2005GL025624. The spatial pattern of recent ice reduction in the Arctic Ocean is similar to the distribution of warm Pacific Summer Water (PSW) that interflows the upper portion of halocline in the southern Canada Basin. Increases in PSW temperature in the basin are also well-correlated with the onset of sea-ice reduction that began in the late 1990s. However, increases in PSW temperature in the basin do not correlate with the temperature of upstream source water in the northeastern Bering Sea, suggesting that there is another mechanism which controls these concurrent changes in ice cover and upper ocean temperature. We propose a feedback mechanism whereby the delayed sea-ice formation in early winter, which began in 1997/1998, reduced internal ice stresses and thus allowed a more efficient coupling of anticyclonic wind forcing to the upper ocean. This, in turn, increased the flux of warm PSW into the basin and caused the catastrophic changes. This work was funded in part by Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.