The Arctic Winter Sea Ice Quadrupole Revisited

Abstract

The dominant mode of Arctic sea ice variability in winter is often maintained to be represented by a quadrupole structure, comprising poles of one sign in the Okhotsk, Greenland, and Barents Seas and of opposing sign in the Labrador and Bering Seas, forced by the North Atlantic Oscillation. This study revisits this large-scale winter mode of sea ice variability using microwave satellite and reanalysis data. It is found that the quadrupole structure does not describe a significant covariance relationship among all four component poles. The first empirical orthogonal mode, explaining covariability in the sea ice of the Barents, Greenland, and Okhotsk Seas, is linked to the Siberian high, while the North Atlantic Oscillation only exhibits a significant relationship with the Labrador Sea ice, which varies independently as the second mode. The principal components are characterized by a strong low-frequency signal; because the satellite record is still short, these results suggest that statistical analyses should be applied cautiously.