Intercomparison of Precipitation Estimates over the Arctic Ocean and Its Peripheral Seas from Reanalyses

Abstract

Precipitation over the Arctic Ocean has a significant impact on the basin-scale freshwater and energy budgets but is one of the most poorly constrained variables in atmospheric reanalyses. Precipitation controls the snow cover on sea ice, which impedes the exchange of energy between the ocean and atmosphere, inhibiting sea ice growth. Thus, accurate precipitation amounts are needed to inform sea ice modeling, especially for the production of thickness estimates from satellite altimetry freeboard data. However, obtaining a quantitative estimate of the precipitation distribution in the Arctic is notoriously difficult because of a number of factors, including a lack of reliable, long-term in situ observations; difficulties in remote sensing over sea ice; and model biases in temperature and moisture fields and associated uncertainty of modeled cloud microphysical processes in the polar regions. Here, we compare precipitation estimates over the Arctic Ocean from eight widely used atmospheric reanalyses over the period 2000–16 (nominally the “new Arctic”). We find that the magnitude, frequency, and phase of precipitation vary drastically, although interannual variability is similar. Reanalysis-derived precipitation does not increase with time as expected; however, an increasing trend of higher fractions of liquid precipitation (rainfall) is found. When compared with drifting ice mass balance buoys, three reanalyses (ERA-Interim, MERRA, and NCEP R2) produce realistic magnitudes and temporal agreement with observed precipitation events, while two products [MERRA, version 2 (MERRA-2), and CFSR] show large, implausible magnitudes in precipitation events. All the reanalyses tend to produce overly frequent Arctic precipitation. Future work needs to be undertaken to determine the specific factors in reanalyses that contribute to these discrepancies in the new Arctic.

Arctic Ocean Precipitation From Atmospheric Reanalyses and Comparisons With North Pole Drifting Station Records

“…These events, in turn, account for between 34% and 55% of the total annual precipitation. Some studies using reanalysis data (e.g., Boisvert et al, 2018) have ignored this light precipitation. Such an approach may be justified on a global scale in light of the tendency for climate models to produce overly frequent drizzle events (e.g., Dai, 2006;Pendergrass & Hartmann, 2014).…”

Quantifying the Potential for Snow‐Ice Formation in the Arctic Ocean

“…These reanalyses have shown relatively good agreement for air temperature and timing of precipitation events (Merkouriadi, Cheng, et al, ), although there is a warm bias in both products during the lowest temperatures in winter (Graham et al, ). But especially, they exhibit significant differences in the magnitude of precipitation (Boisvert et al, ; Chaudhuri et al, ; Merkouriadi, Cheng, et al, ) with ERA‐I producing relatively low and MERRA‐2 producing relatively high precipitation amounts (Boisvert et al, ; Merkouriadi, Cheng, et al, ).…”

Retrievals of Arctic Sea‐Ice Volume and Its Trend Significantly Affected by Interannual Snow Variability

“…For example, Kwok et al () showed that the mean levels of ERA‐Interim accumulated snow depths agree well with Operation IceBridge data (Kurtz & Farrell, ) in the limited regions where observations are available. Recently, Boisvert et al () found that the ERA‐Interim reanalysis produces realistic magnitudes and temporal agreement with observed precipitation events . To complement these existing studies, we here additionally compare the ERA‐Interim/MPIOM snow depths to the modified Warren climatology (Laxon et al, ) where that climatology is based on actual measurements.…”