Abstract
Abstract. In recent decades, the Arctic sea ice has been declining at a rapid pace as the Arctic warms at a rate of twice the global average. The underlying physical mechanisms for the Arctic warming and accelerated sea ice retreat are not fully understood. In this study, we apply a relatively novel statistical method called self-organizing maps (SOM) along with composite analysis to examine the trend and variability of autumn Arctic sea ice in the past three decades and their relationships to large-scale atmospheric circulation changes. Our statistical results show that the anomalous autumn Arctic dipole (AD) (Node 1) and the Arctic Oscillation (AO) (Node 9) could explain in a statistical sense as much as 50 % of autumn sea ice decline between 1979 and 2016. The Arctic atmospheric circulation anomalies associated with anomalous sea-surface temperature (SST) patterns over the North Pacific and North Atlantic influence Arctic sea ice primarily through anomalous temperature and water vapor advection and associated radiative feedback.
Highlights
In recent decades, the Arctic sea ice has been decreasing at an unprecedented rate (Rothrock et al, 1999; Parkinson, 2014)
The surface and upper-air atmospheric variables examined in this study are all extracted from ERA-Interim, except for outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) that is obtained from the gridded monthly OLR data with a 2.5◦ latitude × 2.5◦ longitude grid produced by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (Liebmann and Smith, 1996)
We investigate the potential mechanisms for the autumn Arctic sea ice decline for the period 1979–2016 using the self-organizing maps (SOM) method
Summary
The Arctic sea ice has been decreasing at an unprecedented rate (Rothrock et al, 1999; Parkinson, 2014). We examine the contributions of changes in large-scale atmosphere and ocean circulations to the trends in Arctic sea ice by applying the self-organizing maps (SOM) method (Kohonen, 2001). We will show how much of the recent declining trend in the Arctic sea ice concentrations may be associated with the low-frequency atmospheric circulation modes related to SST anomalies over the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean. Arctic sea ice reduction in autumn has the strongest influence on the wintertime atmospheric circulations over Eurasia and North America (Francis et al, 2009; Petoukhov and Semenov, 2010; Peings and Magnusdottir, 2014)
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