Unexpectedly high dimethyl sulfide concentration in high-latitude Arctic sea ice melt ponds

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 1642-1649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyhong Park ◽  
Intae Kim ◽  
Jung-Ok Choi ◽  
Youngju Lee ◽  
Jinyoung Jung ◽  
...  

Dimethyl sulfide (DMS) production in the northern Arctic Ocean has been considered to be minimal because of high sea ice concentration and extremely low productivity.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Varunesh Chandra ◽  
Sandeep Sukumaran

<p>The melting of polar ice caps and sea ice are of immediate concern in the context of global warming. The observations suggest that the thickness, as well as the areal extent of the Arctic sea ice, have been declining in the last three decades, in large part due to manmade global warming. The effect of faster sea ice melt on lower latitude climate is not well understood as compared to that of mid and high latitudes. It is reported that the mid-Pacific trough (MPT) can be influenced by a stationary wave train triggered in response to a melt of sea ice over the Bering strait (Deng et al., 2018, J. Clim).   The MPT is known to influence Pacific tropical cyclone (TC) activity.</p><p>         Here, we investigate the effect of the summer sea ice variability over the Arctic on Pacific TC activity. We have seen in the higher melting Sea Ice years showing the strong wave train toward the lower latitude over the northern pacific in comparison to the lower melting years and also affecting the pacific TCs. The summer Arctic sea ice concentration is regressed on TC track density and accumulated cyclone energy (ACE). Both track density and ACE show an increase with increased sea ice concentration. The wind shear over the tropical Pacific is found to have an opposite relation with the Arctic sea ice concentration that led to a more favorable environment for the TC development when the sea ice concentration is high.</p><p><strong>KEYWORDS: </strong>Climate Change; Tropical Cylone;</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 2481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana Alekseeva ◽  
Vasiliy Tikhonov ◽  
Sergei Frolov ◽  
Irina Repina ◽  
Mikhael Raev ◽  
...  

The paper presents a comparison of sea ice concentration (SIC) derived from satellite microwave radiometry data and dedicated ship observations. For the purpose, the NASA Team (NT), Arctic Radiation and Turbulence Interaction Study (ARTIST) Sea Ice (ASI), and Variation Arctic/Antarctic Sea Ice Algorithm 2 (VASIA2) algorithms were used as well as the database of visual ice observations accumulated in the course of 15 Arctic expeditions. The comparison was performed in line with the SIC gradation (in tenths) into very open (1–3), open (4–6), close (7–8), very close and compact (9–10,10) ice, separately for summer and winter seasons. On average, in summer NT underestimates SIC by 0.4 tenth as compared to ship observations, while ASI and VASIA2 by 0.3 tenth. All three algorithms overestimate total SIC in regions of very open ice and underestimate it in regions of close, very close, and compact ice. The maximum average errors are typical of open ice regions that are most common in marginal ice zones. In winter, NT and ASI also underestimate SIC on average by 0.4 and 0.8 tenths, respectively, while VASIA2, on the contrary, overestimates by 0.2 tenth against the ship data, however, for open and close ice the average errors are significantly higher than in summer. In the paper, we also estimate the impact of ice melt stage and presence of new ice and nilas on SIC derived from NT, ASI, and VASIA2.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Heorton ◽  
Michel Tsamados ◽  
Paul Holland ◽  
Jack Landy

<p><span>We combine satellite-derived observations of sea ice concentration, drift, and thickness to provide the first observational decomposition of the dynamic (advection/divergence) and thermodynamic (melt/growth) drivers of wintertime Arctic sea ice volume change. Ten winter growth seasons are analyzed over the CryoSat-2 period between October 2010 and April 2020. Sensitivity to several observational products is performed to provide an estimated uncertainty of the budget calculations. The total thermodynamic ice volume growth and dynamic ice losses are calculated with marked seasonal, inter-annual and regional variations</span><span>. Ice growth is fastest during Autumn, in the Marginal Seas and over first year ice</span><span>. Our budget decomposition methodology can help diagnose the processes confounding climate model predictions of sea ice. We make our product and code available to the community in monthly pan-Arctic netcdft files for the entire October 2010 to April 2020 period.</span></p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Semenov ◽  
Tatiana Matveeva

<p>Global warming in the recent decades has been accompanied by a rapid recline of the Arctic sea ice area most pronounced in summer (10% per decade). To understand the relative contribution of external forcing and natural variability to the modern and future sea ice area changes, it is necessary to evaluate a range of long-term variations of the Arctic sea ice area in the period before a significant increase in anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Available observational data on the spatiotemporal dynamics of Arctic sea ice until 1950s are characterized by significant gaps and uncertainties. In the recent years, there have appeared several reconstructions of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century Arctic sea ice area that filled the gaps by analogue methods or utilized combined empirical data and climate model’s output. All of them resulted in a stronger that earlier believed negative sea ice area anomaly in the 1940s concurrent with the early 20<sup>th</sup> century warming (ETCW) peak. In this study, we reconstruct the monthly average gridded sea ice concentration (SIC) in the first half of the 20th century using the relationship between the spatiotemporal features of SIC variability, surface air temperature over the Northern Hemisphere extratropical continents, sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, and sea level pressure. In agreement with a few previous results, our reconstructed data also show a significant negative anomaly of the Arctic sea ice area in the middle of the 20th century, however with some 15% to 30% stronger amplitude, about 1.5 million km<sup>2</sup> in September and 0.7 million km<sup>2</sup> in March. The reconstruction demonstrates a good agreement with regional Arctic sea ice area data when available and suggests that ETWC in the Arctic has been accompanied by a concurrent sea ice area decline of a magnitude that have been exceeded only in the beginning of the 21<sup>st</sup> century.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francois Massonnet ◽  
Sara Fleury ◽  
Florent Garnier ◽  
Ed Blockley ◽  
Pablo Ortega Montilla ◽  
...  

<p>It is well established that winter and spring Arctic sea-ice thickness anomalies are a key source of predictability for late summer sea-ice concentration. While numerical general circulation models (GCMs) are increasingly used to perform seasonal predictions, they are not systematically taking advantage of the wealth of polar observations available. Data assimilation, the study of how to constrain GCMs to produce a physically consistent state given observations and their uncertainties, remains, therefore, an active area of research in the field of seasonal prediction. With the recent advent of satellite laser and radar altimetry, large-scale estimates of sea-ice thickness have become available for data assimilation in GCMs. However, the sea-ice thickness is never directly observed by altimeters, but rather deduced from the measured sea-ice freeboard (the height of the emerged part of the sea ice floe) based on several assumptions like the depth of snow on sea ice and its density, which are both often poorly estimated. Thus, observed sea-ice thickness estimates are potentially less reliable than sea-ice freeboard estimates. Here, using the EC-Earth3 coupled forecasting system and an ensemble Kalman filter, we perform a set of sensitivity tests to answer the following questions: (1) Does the assimilation of late spring observed sea-ice freeboard or thickness information yield more skilful predictions than no assimilation at all? (2) Should the sea-ice freeboard assimilation be preferred over sea-ice thickness assimilation? (3) Does the assimilation of observed sea-ice concentration provide further constraints on the prediction? We address these questions in the context of a realistic test case, the prediction of 2012 summer conditions, which led to the all-time record low in Arctic sea-ice extent. We finally formulate a set of recommendations for practitioners and future users of sea ice observations in the context of seasonal prediction.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 521-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leandro Ponsoni ◽  
François Massonnet ◽  
Thierry Fichefet ◽  
Matthieu Chevallier ◽  
David Docquier

Abstract. The ocean–sea ice reanalyses are one of the main sources of Arctic sea ice thickness data both in terms of spatial and temporal resolution, since observations are still sparse in time and space. In this work, we first aim at comparing how the sea ice thickness from an ensemble of 14 reanalyses compares with different sources of observations, such as moored upward-looking sonars, submarines, airbornes, satellites, and ice boreholes. Second, based on the same reanalyses, we intend to characterize the timescales (persistence) and length scales of sea ice thickness anomalies. We investigate whether data assimilation of sea ice concentration by the reanalyses impacts the realism of sea ice thickness as well as its respective timescales and length scales. The results suggest that reanalyses with sea ice data assimilation do not necessarily perform better in terms of sea ice thickness compared with the reanalyses which do not assimilate sea ice concentration. However, data assimilation has a clear impact on the timescales and length scales: reanalyses built with sea ice data assimilation present shorter timescales and length scales. The mean timescales and length scales for reanalyses with data assimilation vary from 2.5 to 5.0 months and 337.0 to 732.5 km, respectively, while reanalyses with no data assimilation are characterized by values from 4.9 to 7.8 months and 846.7 to 935.7 km, respectively.


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