Summertime atmospheric processes play a role in Arctic Ocean warming

This map shows temperature anomalies in the Arctic in 2021. Areas with below-average temperatures are blue, and areas with above-average temperatures are red and orange. Credit: Climate.gov

The observed warming of the Arctic Ocean over the last 40 years has been largely attributed to human-driven changes in the Arctic due to greenhouse gases. Researchers from UC Santa Barbara and University of Washington, supported in part by CPO’s Climate Variability & Predictability (CVP) and Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) programs, are now taking a closer look at the role of internal variability in Arctic Ocean warming. Using both observational and modeling analyses, they investigated how a multiyear trend in the Arctic’s summertime large-scale atmospheric circulation has regulated upper ocean temperature since 1979. Their work, published in Nature Communications, offers physical understanding of the underlying mechanism of this atmosphere-ocean interaction and a quantification of its contribution to the recent warming compared with that due to human-led causes.

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