Abstract
Recent air temperature changes in the high Arctic (HA) have been investigated based on mean seasonal and annual data calculated for the period 1951–2015 and for two sub-periods 1976–2015 and 1996–2015. Two kinds of air temperature data (observational and reanalysis) have been used in the research. The observational data were compared with data taken from six reanalysis products (20CRv2c, CERA-20C, ERA-Int, MERRA-2, NCEP-CFSRR, JRA-55). The scale of the HA warming for the period 1996–2015 relative to the reference period 1951–1990 reached 1.6 °C for annual mean and was greatest in autumn (1.9 °C) and in winter (1.7 °C), while it was smallest in summer (0.9 °C). Evidently, the greatest warming was observed in the Atlantic and Siberian climatic regions, while in the rest of the HA, the rate of warming was usually weaker than trends calculated for the period 1976–2015. Air temperature tendencies in all study periods 1951–2015, 1976–2015 and 1996–2015 showed a predominance of positive trends that were statistically significant at the level of 0.05. In the two latter periods, the rate of warming was on average 2–3 times faster than for the entire study period. In the HA, there has not been a slowdown in the rate of warming (“hiatus”) in the last two decades (in contrast to that which was noted for the Northern Hemisphere). Our results reveal that, in most cases, the closest fit to observations was obtained for two reanalysis products (the ERA-Interim and JRA-55, since 1979) and the six reanalysis average. Two new polar amplification (PA) metrics based on scaled and standardised values of surface air temperature (SAT) reveal the non-existence of this phenomenon in the period 1951–2015. One of the metrics shows very small PA in the periods 1976–2015 and 1996–2015.
Highlights
A myriad of papers published recently document large, and sometimes even dramatic, environmental changes in the Arctic as a consequence of its recent warming, which Overland et al (2016) describe as “unequivocal, substantial and ongoing”
The great and dramatic warming in the high Arctic (HA) began in the mid-1990s, and to quantitatively estimate the scale of this warming, we decided to calculate surface air temperature (SAT) anomalies from 1996 to 2015 in reference to 1951–1990, which was used as the reference period in all previous works (Przybylak 2000, 2002, 2007, 2016) and is very convenient for comparison purposes (Table 2)
In the RRAW period, very large increases in both seasonal and annual means were observed in the ATLR and the Siberian region, while in the rest of the Arctic, the rate of warming was usually weaker than trends for the CGW period
Summary
A myriad of papers published recently document large, and sometimes even dramatic, environmental changes in the Arctic (see, e.g. ACIA 2004; IPCC 2013) as a consequence of its recent warming, which Overland et al (2016) describe as “unequivocal, substantial and ongoing”. Studies that would improve our knowledge of the influence of Arctic warming in terms of changes observed both in its environment and in climate conditions at lower latitudes urgently need good quality information on changes in the principal climate variable, i.e. 2-m air temperature (hereinafter SAT), in recent decades To obtain such quality of information, the collected instrumental data should fulfil the following criteria: (a) the number of data series for each year, season and month of the study period should be identical, which is not the rule in many works (see, e.g. Polyakov et al 2003); (b) all data should be quality controlled and homogeneous; (c) if possible, should be taken directly from meteorological institutes (or other institutions) responsible for
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