Abstract
In January 2016, the Arctic experienced an extremely anomalous warming event after an extraordinary increase in air temperature at the end of 2015. During this event, a strong intrusion of warm and moist air and an increase in downward longwave radiation, as well as a loss of sea ice in the Barents and Kara seas, were observed. Observational analyses revealed that the abrupt warming was triggered by the entry of a strong Atlantic windstorm into the Arctic in late December 2015, which brought enormous moist and warm air masses to the Arctic. Although the storm terminated at the eastern coast of Greenland in late December, it was followed by a prolonged blocking period in early 2016 that sustained the extreme Arctic warming. Numerical experiments indicate that the warming effect of sea ice loss and associated upward turbulent heat fluxes are relatively minor in this event. This result suggests the importance of the synoptically driven warm and moist air intrusion into the Arctic as a primary contributing factor of this extreme Arctic warming event.
Highlights
The meteorological variables are obtained from the Japanese
The high-resolution National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) optimum interpolation SST version 2 dataset (OISST v2)[36] is used for the sea ice cover and SST. These datasets are used for both the observational analyses and the lower boundary conditions of the model experiments
The anomalies are calculated based on the 30-yr climatology for the period of 1981–2010
Summary
The sea ice concentration in the Barents and Kara seas was substantially reduced during the warming event. Quantifying the role of upward surface turbulent heat fluxes over the area of sea ice loss for the Arctic warming is more relevant.
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