Emerging trends in the sea state of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas

Thomson, Jim; Fan, Yalin; Stammerjohn, Sharon; Stopa, Justin E.; Rogers, W. Erick; Girard-Ardhuin, Fanny; Ardhuin, Fabrice; Shen, Hayley H.; Perrie, Will; Shen, Hui; Ackley, Steve; Babanin, Alexander V.; Liu, Qingxiang; Guest, Peter; Maksym, Ted; Wadhams, Peter; Fairall, C. W.; Persson, Ola; Doble, M; Graber, Hans C.; Lund, B.; Squire, Vernon A.; Gemmrich, Johannes; Lehner, Susanne; Holt, Benjamin; Meylan, Michael H.; Brozena, J. M.; Bidlot, Jean‐Raymond

doi:10.1016/j.ocemod.2016.02.009

Cited by 90 publications

(106 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Therefore we expect the Arctic to be very sensitive to changes in sea ice, winds, and waves in the fall compared to any other time period. This has led Thomson and Rogers (2014) and Thomson et al (2016) to suggest a positive feedback mechanism linking enhanced wave heights to the larger ocean expanses which cause more ice breakup. However, this process is convoluted by the fact that the wave steepness is lessened, which reduces the effectiveness of the ice breakup by waves.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wave climate in the Arctic 1992–2014: seasonality and trends

2016

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Abstract. Over the past decade, the diminishing Arctic sea ice has impacted the wave field, which depends on the icefree ocean and wind. This study characterizes the wave climate in the Arctic spanning 1992-2014 from a merged altimeter data set and a wave hindcast that uses CFSR winds and ice concentrations from satellites as input. The model performs well, verified by the altimeters, and is relatively consistent for climate studies. The wave seasonality and extremes are linked to the ice coverage, wind strength, and wind direction, creating distinct features in the wind seas and swells. The altimeters and model show that the reduction of sea ice coverage causes increasing wave heights instead of the wind. However, trends are convoluted by interannual climate oscillations like the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation. In the Nordic Greenland Sea the NAO influences the decreasing wind speeds and wave heights. Swells are becoming more prevalent and windsea steepness is declining. The satellite data show the sea ice minimum occurs later in fall when the wind speeds increase. This creates more favorable conditions for wave development. Therefore we expect the ice freeze-up in fall to be the most critical season in the Arctic and small changes in ice cover, wind speeds, and wave heights can have large impacts to the evolution of the sea ice throughout the year. It is inconclusive how important wave-ice processes are within the climate system, but selected events suggest the importance of waves within the marginal ice zone.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wave climate in the Arctic 1992–2014: seasonality and trends

2016

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“…The smallest trends occur in summer; however, there are some positive regional trends due to earlier breakup of the first-year sea ice in the central Arctic Ocean and Beaufort Sea and possibly earlier/larger occurrence of melt ponds on the sea ice, causing the surface temperature to be warmer compared to a solid, snow-covered sea ice pack. Regions where the largest trends are found in MAM also experienced earlier sea ice melt onset (defined in Section 2.4.2) in recent years and less sea ice coverage, especially in the Barents Sea [27,50]. In several regions, the strongest positive (Kara, Laptev, and E. Siberian Seas) and negative (E. Greenland and Bering Seas) LH flux trends occur in SON.…”

Section: Surface Turbulent Flux Trendsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Recently, increased wave action in the Arctic Ocean has been observed and attributed to the increased ice-free water distance or fetch over which the winds blow [50,[236][237][238]. Changes in wave action and wave breaking directly modulate air-sea exchange [231,239,240] such that increased wave heights and lengths increase surface turbulent fluxes, sea spray, and can potentially enhance sea ice break-up [104,237].…”

Section: Ocean Heat Transport Variability and Mixed-layer Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Through effects on the air-surface temperature contrast, sea ice loss modulates surface turbulent fluxes affecting the feedbacks between the atmosphere, ocean, and sea ice [43][44][45][46][47][48]. The observed earlier spring melt onset and delayed fall sea ice freeze-up are changing the seasonality of all air-sea fluxes with significant implications for Arctic climate [40,41,45,46,49,50]. The future rate of Arctic climate change remains an open question that challenges state-of-the-art climate models.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Increasing Importance of Air-Sea Exchanges in a Thawing Arctic: A Review

et al. 2018

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Forty years ago, climate scientists predicted the Arctic to be one of Earth's most sensitive climate regions and thus extremely vulnerable to increased CO 2 . The rapid and unprecedented changes observed in the Arctic confirm this prediction. Especially significant, observed sea ice loss is altering the exchange of mass, energy, and momentum between the Arctic Ocean and atmosphere.As an important component of air-sea exchange, surface turbulent fluxes are controlled by vertical gradients of temperature and humidity between the surface and atmosphere, wind speed, and surface roughness, indicating that they respond to other forcing mechanisms such as atmospheric advection, ocean mixing, and radiative flux changes. The exchange of energy between the atmosphere and surface via surface turbulent fluxes in turn feeds back on the Arctic surface energy budget, sea ice, clouds, boundary layer temperature and humidity, and atmospheric and oceanic circulations. Understanding and attributing variability and trends in surface turbulent fluxes is important because they influence the magnitude of Arctic climate change, sea ice cover variability, and the atmospheric circulation response to increased CO 2 . This paper reviews current knowledge of Arctic Ocean surface turbulent fluxes and their effects on climate. We conclude that Arctic Ocean surface turbulent fluxes are having an increasingly consequential influence on Arctic climate variability in response to strong regional trends in the air-surface temperature contrast related to the changing character of the Arctic sea ice cover. Arctic Ocean surface turbulent energy exchanges are not smooth and steady but rather irregular and episodic, and consideration of the episodic nature of surface turbulent fluxes is essential for improving Arctic climate projections.

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“…tend to occur over larger and larger areas. There is a growing observational and modeling evidence that wave-ice interactions play an important role in the observed expansion of MIZ and negative trends in sea ice extent (see, e.g., Asplin et al, 2012Asplin et al, , 2014Thomson and Rogers, 2014;Thomson et al, 2016). Thin, fragmented sea ice is susceptible to further breaking and, depending on ambient weather and oceanic conditions, melting, which facilitates faster ice drift, a decrease in ice concentration, and an increase in wind fetch and thus creates more favorable conditions for wave propagation and generation, leading to still stronger fragmentation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wave-induced stress and breaking of sea ice in a coupled hydrodynamic discrete-element wave–ice model

Herman

2017

The Cryosphere

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Abstract. In this paper, a coupled sea ice-wave model is developed and used to analyze wave-induced stress and breaking in sea ice for a range of wave and ice conditions. The sea ice module is a discrete-element bonded-particle model, in which ice is represented as cuboid "grains" floating on the water surface that can be connected to their neighbors by elastic joints. The joints may break if instantaneous stresses acting on them exceed their strength. The wave module is based on an open-source version of the Non-Hydrostatic WAVE model (NHWAVE). The two modules are coupled with proper boundary conditions for pressure and velocity, exchanged at every wave model time step. In the present version, the model operates in two dimensions (one vertical and one horizontal) and is suitable for simulating compact ice in which heave and pitch motion dominates over surge. In a series of simulations with varying sea ice properties and incoming wavelength it is shown that wave-induced stress reaches maximum values at a certain distance from the ice edge. The value of maximum stress depends on both ice properties and characteristics of incoming waves, but, crucially for ice breaking, the location at which the maximum occurs does not change with the incoming wavelength. Consequently, both regular and random (Jonswap spectrum) waves break the ice into floes with almost identical sizes. The width of the zone of broken ice depends on ice strength and wave attenuation rates in the ice.

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Emerging trends in the sea state of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas

Cited by 90 publications

References 37 publications

Wave climate in the Arctic 1992–2014: seasonality and trends

Wave climate in the Arctic 1992–2014: seasonality and trends

On the Increasing Importance of Air-Sea Exchanges in a Thawing Arctic: A Review

Wave-induced stress and breaking of sea ice in a coupled hydrodynamic discrete-element wave–ice model

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