Abstract

Recent studies demonstrate that the Antarctic Ozone Hole has important influences on Antarctic sea ice. While most of these works have focused on effects associated with atmospheric and oceanic dynamic processes caused by stratospheric ozone changes, here we show that stratospheric ozone-induced cloud radiative effects also play important roles in causing changes in Antarctic sea ice. Our simulations demonstrate that the recovery of the Antarctic Ozone Hole causes decreases in clouds over Southern Hemisphere (SH) high latitudes and increases in clouds over the SH extratropics. The decrease in clouds leads to a reduction in downward infrared radiation, especially in austral autumn. This results in cooling of the Southern Ocean surface and increasing Antarctic sea ice. Surface cooling also involves ice-albedo feedback. Increasing sea ice reflects solar radiation and causes further cooling and more increases in Antarctic sea ice.

Highlights

  • Both observations and simulations have demonstrated that severe ozone depletion in the Antarctic stratosphere is the major driver of changes in Southern Hemisphere (SH) climates and atmospheric and oceanic circulations (Thompson et al, 2011; Previdi and Polvani, 2014)

  • While one study suggested that the poleward jet shift due to the Antarctic Ozone Hole might have caused the observed expansion of Antarctic sea ice (Turner et al, 2009), more recent studies show that ozone depletion should cause a poleward retreat of sea ice (Sigmond and Fyfe, 2010, 2014; Bitz and Polvani, 2012; Smith et al, 2012; Grise et al, 2013; Polvani and Smith, 2013; Turner et al, 2013; Haumann et al, 2014), and that ozone recovery in the 21st century would cause expansion of Antarctic sea ice (Smith et al, 2012)

  • Ferreira et al (2015) argued that the response of sea ice to stratospheric ozone depletion is a two-time-scale problem: rapid cooling followed by slow but persistent warming. These works show that the linkage between stratospheric ozone changes and Antarctic sea ice is the latitudinal shift of the westerly jet stream around the Antarctic

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Summary

Introduction

Both observations and simulations have demonstrated that severe ozone depletion in the Antarctic stratosphere is the major driver of changes in Southern Hemisphere (SH) climates and atmospheric and oceanic circulations (Thompson et al, 2011; Previdi and Polvani, 2014) (and references in these two review papers) These works demonstrated that the Antarctic Ozone Hole leads to a poleward shift of the westerly jet stream and the trend toward a high polarity of the Southern Annular Mode (Thompson and Solomon, 2002; Son et al, 2009; Polvani et al, 2011; Hu et al, 2013; Tao et al, 2016).

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