Projecting Wintertime Newly Formed Arctic Sea Ice through Weighting CMIP6 Model Performance and Independence

Abstract

AbstractPrecipitous Arctic sea-ice decline and the corresponding increase in Arctic open-water areas in summer months give more space for sea-ice growth in the subsequent cold seasons. Compared to the decline of the entire Arctic multiyear sea ice, changes in newly formed sea ice indicate more thermodynamic and dynamic information on Arctic atmosphere–ocean–ice interaction and northern mid–high latitude atmospheric teleconnections. Here, we use a large multimodel ensemble from phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) to investigate future changes in wintertime newly formed Arctic sea ice. The commonly used model-democracy approach that gives equal weight to each model essentially assumes that all models are independent and equally plausible, which contradicts with the fact that there are large interdependencies in the ensemble and discrepancies in models’ performances in reproducing observations. Therefore, instead of using the arithmetic mean of well-performing models or all available models for projections like in previous studies, we employ a newly developed model weighting scheme that weights all models in the ensemble with consideration of their performance and independence to provide more reliable projections. Model democracy leads to evident bias and large intermodel spread in CMIP6 projections of newly formed Arctic sea ice. However, we show that both the bias and the intermodel spread can be effectively reduced by the weighting scheme. Projections from the weighted models indicate that wintertime newly formed Arctic sea ice is likely to increase dramatically until the middle of this century regardless of the emissions scenario. Thereafter, it may decrease (or remain stable) if the Arctic warming crosses a threshold (or is extensively constrained).