Authors: Ivar A Seierstad Jürgen Bader
Publish Date: 2008/09/09
Volume: 33, Issue: 7-8, Pages: 937-
Abstract
The impact of a reduced Arctic sea ice cover on wintertime extratropical storminess is investigated by conducting atmospheric general circulation model AGCM experiments The AGCM ECHAM5 is forced by the present and a projected future seasonal cycle of Arctic sea ice In the experiment with projected seaice concentrations significant reductions in storminess were found during December and January in both midlatitudes and towards the Arctic However a substantially larger reduction in extratropical storminess was found in March despite a smaller change in surface energy fluxes in March than in the other winter months The projected decrease in storminess is also related to the negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation NAO The March response is consistent with a forcing from transient and quasistationary eddies associated with negative NAO events The greater sensitivity to seaice anomalies in late winter sets this study apart from earlier onesWe thank Nils Gunnar Kvamstø Gudrun Magnusdottir and Justin Wettstein for insightful discussions We thank the MaxPlanckInstitute for Meteorology for providing and supporting the ECHAM5 model The UK Meteorological Office and Hadley Centre is acknowledged for providing the HadISST 11—global seaice coverage and SST—dataset We acknowledge the modeling groups the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison PCMDI and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling WGCM for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multimodel dataset Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science US Department of Energy This work was supported by the COMPAS and NorClim projects funded by the research council of Norway The model runs have been performed at the Norwegian Metacenter For Computational Science NOTUR in Trondheim
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