| Summary: | Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2014. 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 41 (2014): 8619–8626, doi:10.1002/2014GL062107. We describe the recent occurrence of a region of diminished sea ice cover or “notch” offshore of the Kangerdlugssuaq Fiord, the site of the largest tidewater glacier along Greenland's southeast coast. The notch's location is consistent with a topographically forced flux of warm water toward the fiord, and the decrease of the sea ice cover is shown to be associated with a regional warming of the upper ocean that began in the mid-1990s. Sea ice in the vicinity of the notch also exhibits interannual variability that is shown to be associated with a seesaw in surface temperature and sea ice between southeast and northeast Greenland that is not describable solely in terms of the North Atlantic Oscillation. We therefore argue that other modes of atmospheric variability, including the Lofoten Low, are required to fully document the changes to the climate that are occurring along Greenland's east coast. G.W.K.M. was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. F.S. and M.O. were supported by NSF OCE 1130008 and NASA NNX13AK88G. 2015-06-02
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