Reducing the Spring Barrier in Predicting Summer Arctic Sea Ice Concentration

Abstract

Under the influence of climate change, the Arctic has warmed at least twice the rate of global warming (Ballinger et al., 2020;Rantanen et al., 2022) There has been a corresponding rapid decrease of summer sea ice concentration (SIC) in the seasonal ice area, along with a retreat of Arctic summer sea ice extent, decreasing at a rate of around 13% per decade (Perovich et al., 2020). Consequently, chances have arisen for increased economic and conservation activity in the Arctic, which urges for more precise predictions of Arctic SIC (e.g.

Improvements in September Arctic Sea Ice Predictions Via Assimilation of Summer CryoSat‐2 Sea Ice Thickness Observations

“…Due to the shortness of the data record, no studies have explored the potential benefits of SIT DA on improving predictions of SIE interannual variability. Dynamical and statistical prediction systems have been found to consistently display an Arctic sea ice spring predictability barrier, in which forecasts initialized before June 1 have much lower skill than the forecasts initialized after (Bonan et al, 2019;Bushuk et al, 2020;Zeng et al, 2023). Therefore, the conventional satellite-retrieved winter SIT observations are likely sub-optimal for improving summer Arctic sea ice predictions.…”