Unprecedented Arctic sea ice thickness loss and multiyear-ice volume export through Fram Strait during 2010–2011

Abstract

The satellite-observed sea ice thickness records from 2003 to 2020 identify an extreme sea ice thickness loss during 2010–2011. Ice thickness budget analysis demonstrates that the thickness loss was associated with an extraordinarily large multiyear ice volume export through the Fram Strait during the season of sea ice advance. High cloudiness led to positive anomalies of net longwave radiation, and positive net surface energy flux anomalies supported enhanced sea ice melt from June to August. Due to the multiyear ice loss, the Arctic sea ice became more sensitive to subsequent atmospheric anomalies. The reduced surface albedo triggering a positive ice-albedo amplifying feedback and contributed to the accelerating loss of ice thickness. These tightly coupled events highlight that the increasingly younger and thinner Arctic sea ice is becoming more vulnerable to external forcing and created the precondition for the rapid reduction in sea ice extent in 2012.

The evolution of the Fram Strait sea ice volume export decomposed by age: estimating with parameter-optimized sea ice-ocean model outputs

“…SIV export through the Fram Strait is an important dynamic process for regulating sea ice mass and freshwater balance of the Arctic (Lind et al 2018, Spreen et al 2020, Li et al 2022. However, disagreements still surround the magnitude and also trend estimates of the SIV flux across the strait, and analysis is still short of the detailed decomposition of SIV flux according to sea ice age especially the decomposition for MYI.…”

Improving Arctic sea-ice thickness estimates with the assimilation of CryoSat-2 summer observations

“…The performance of our experiments during the year 2016 is, therefore, a performance assessment manuscript submitted to Geophysical Research Letters indicator of this system. Given that CMST data is already well-validated and applied (e.g., Li et al, 2022;Min et al, 2019;Min et al, 2021;Zhou et al, 2021), following Yang et al (2019), restart files from this retrospective simulation (CMST) were used as the initial ice-ocean conditions for the DA experiments.…”

“…In particular, to improve the ice-thickness estimates, a year-round Combined Model and Satellite Thickness (CMST) reanalysis has been developed by assimilating the CryoSat-2 and SMOS thickness data throughout the freezing season . Although CMST has been systematically evaluated and widely used (e.g., Li et al, 2022;Min et al, 2019;Min et al, 2021;Zhou et al, 2021), the SIT is only corrected indirectly in summer through the positive covariance between SIC, which is assimilated, and SIT, which is not during the summer months. Moreover, the weekly mean SIT from CryoSat-2 is simply assimilated every day of the week during the cold season , which may introduce unphysical "jumps" at the transition of different weeks and seasons (i.e., winter-summer and summerwinter).…”

Focus on Arctic change: transdisciplinary research and communication

“…They further show how such changes to the atmospheric circulation reach beyond the Arctic to mid-latitude regions. Li et al (2022) report on an extreme loss of ice during a single year (2010)(2011), triggering a positive ice-albedo amplifying feedback that accelerated ice extent reduction in the following years, by focusing on Arctic sea ice dynamics (its extent but especially its thickness) over the last decades as shown by satellite imagery. Such results clearly show the vulnerability of Arctic environments to climate-induced non-linear (i.e.…”