Impacts of regional Arctic sea ice loss and the role of QBO

• Main Authors: Eade, Rosie, Smith, Doug
• Format: Lecture
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2020
• Subjects: North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4541192

Climate model studies investigating the role of Arctic sea ice loss in future projections have shown a wide range of possible mid-latitude responses in the northern hemisphere, beyond the more robust local thermodynamic warming response. We use new atmosphere-only experiments from the Polar-Amplification-MIP of CMIP6 to further investigate how the dynamic responses in the atmosphere relate to the pattern of sea ice loss in the Arctic on multi-decadal time-scales. The multi-model winter response to reduced Arctic Sea Ice adds further evidence of an equatorward shift of the tropospheric jet and a shift towards the negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation. In the Met Office model we find that this tropospheric response is somewhat dominated by the Barents/Kara Seas region, while the stratospheric response is much stronger when the winter Quasi-Biennial Oscillation is in an Easterly phase.