Recent Arctic Sea Ice Variability: Connections to the Arctic Oscillation and the ENSO

Abstract

[1] Trends in the satellite-derived Arctic sea ice concentrations show pronounced decreases in the Barents/Kara Seas, between the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, the central Sea of Okhotsk and a portion of the Hudson/Baffin Bay by $2 -8% per decade, exceeding the 95% confidence level. Qualitatively speaking, positive phases of the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) produce similar ice changes in the western Arctic, but opposite ice changes in the eastern Arctic. The manner in which the ice changes are related to the AO and ENSO are demonstrated. Over the last 24 years, the magnitude of the ice changes associated with the positive AO trend and the negative ENSO trend is much smaller than the regional ice trends. Thus, more local or less understood large scale processes should be investigated for explanations.

Dependence of NAO variability on coupling with sea ice

“…As an example of this coupling, the upward trend of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index (N) from the 1960s through the mid-1990s increased the rate of winter sea ice retreat over the North Atlantic (Deser 2000;Venegas and Mysak 2000;Rigor et al 2002;Hu et al 2002;Liu and Curry 2004;Rothrock and Zhang 2005;Ukita et al 2007). Since then, the NAO trend has reversed, and an overall downward trend in total sea ice extent is emerging that appears to be anthropogenic (Johannessen et al 2004) and accelerating in summer (e.g.…”

“…During positive NAO, sea ice concentrations in the Barents Sea tend to be lower than average in association with increased temperatures related to enhanced atmospheric and oceanic heat transport (Yamamoto et al 2006;Wang et al 2000;Liu and Curry 2004). Koenigk et al (2009) recently used a fully coupled model to show that that sea ice concentrations within the Barents Sea are most sensitive to wind-driven sea ice transport, with oceanic heat transport playing a small role in interannual variations and a large role in variations on longer time scales.…”

Is extreme Arctic sea ice anomaly in 2007 a key contributor to severe January 2008 snowstorm in China?

“…Significant decline of the Arctic sea ice has been documented in recent years (Liu et al, 2004;Comiso et al, 2008). The extreme sea ice cover anomaly observed in the summer and fall of 2007 represents a dramatic departure from historical trend line (Stroeve et al, 2008).…”

Arctic sea ice and the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO)

“…Part of its complexity comes from its sensitivity to the atmosphere on a range of spatial and temporal scales. For example, decades of observational and modeling studies of sea ice have confirmed that its variability is primarily a top-down process (Liu et al 2004;Deser and Teng 2008), where the atmosphere provides the primary forcing mechanisms (Hopsch et al 2012). In response, sea ice tends to organize-via motion, formation, melting, and accretion-in accordance with large-scale patterns of atmospheric circulation (Walsh and Johnson 1979;Overland and Pease 1982;Fang and Wallace 1994;Slonosky et al 1997;Prinsenberg et al 1997;Overland and Wang 2010).…”

“…In response, sea ice tends to organize-via motion, formation, melting, and accretion-in accordance with large-scale patterns of atmospheric circulation (Walsh and Johnson 1979;Overland and Pease 1982;Fang and Wallace 1994;Slonosky et al 1997;Prinsenberg et al 1997;Overland and Wang 2010). Because of these responses to the atmosphere, concentrations of sea ice have been found to be correlated with several of the major modes of atmospheric variability, including the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) (Deser et al 2000;Kwok 2000;Parkinson 2000;Partington et al 2003), the Arctic Oscillation (AO) (Wang and Ikeda 2000;Rigor et al 2002;Belchansky et al 2004) (the NAO and AO are often referred to as part of the Northern Hemisphere annular mode; Wallace 2000), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) (Liu et al 2004), and longer-period oscillations (Polyakov et al 2003). Furthermore, the leading mode of atmospheric intraseasonal variability, the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO; Madden and Julian 1972), has been shown to modulate the high-latitude (Zhou and Miller 2005;Cassou 2008) and Arctic (L'Heureux and Higgins 2008;Yoo et al 2011) atmosphere.…”