Abstract
The El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a quasiperiedic variation in climate which arises from a complex interaction between the tropical Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere 1 . ENSO events, which occur every two to seven years, arc the largest source of interannual variability of temperature and precipitation on a global scale, although their effects are most profound in the tropics 1 . Observations of sea-ice margins have been used to monitor global climate changes on timescales of greater than a decade 2 , and there is some evidence for interannual variations in records of sea-ice cover 3 . But short-term changes in sea-ice cover are masked by pronounced seasonal variations, making it difficult to correlate them with specific climate phenomena. Using a multiple-window harmonic analysis technique 4-8 , I show here that time series of sea-ice cover from the Arctic and Antarctic contain statistically significant quasi-biennial and quasi-quadrennial periodicities that agree well with variations in the ENSO index. The response of sea ice to these two frequency components varies greatly for different regions
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