Affiliation:
1. Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
Abstract
Abstract
The minimum of Arctic sea ice extent in the summer of 2007 was unprecedented in the historical record. A coupled ice–ocean model is used to determine the state of the ice and ocean over the past 29 yr to investigate the causes of this ice extent minimum within a historical perspective. It is found that even though the 2007 ice extent was strongly anomalous, the loss in total ice mass was not. Rather, the 2007 ice mass loss is largely consistent with a steady decrease in ice thickness that began in 1987. Since then, the simulated mean September ice thickness within the Arctic Ocean has declined from 3.7 to 2.6 m at a rate of −0.57 m decade−1. Both the area coverage of thin ice at the beginning of the melt season and the total volume of ice lost in the summer have been steadily increasing. The combined impact of these two trends caused a large reduction in the September mean ice concentration in the Arctic Ocean. This created conditions during the summer of 2007 that allowed persistent winds to push the remaining ice from the Pacific side to the Atlantic side of the basin and more than usual into the Greenland Sea. This exposed large areas of open water, resulting in the record ice extent anomaly.
Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Reference35 articles.
1. Duration of the Arctic sea ice melt season: Regional and interannual variability, 1979–2001.;Belchansky;J. Climate,2004
2. A numerical method for the study of the circulation of the world oceans.;Bryan;J. Comput. Phys.,1969
3. A rapidly declining perennial sea ice cover in the Arctic.;Comiso;Geophys. Res. Lett.,2002
4. Accelerated decline in the Arctic sea ice cover.;Comiso;Geophys. Res. Lett.,2008
5. Cox, M. D.
, 1984: A primitive equation, three-dimensional model of the oceans. GFDL Ocean Group Tech. Rep. 1, NOAA/GFDL, 250 pp.
Cited by
166 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献