Increasing Fluctuations and Sensitivity of Arctic Summer Sea-Ice Cover
Are Expected With Future Global Warming
Abstract
Every year, the area of the Arctic sea-ice decreases in the boreal
spring and summer and reaches its yearly minimum in the early autumn.
The continuous satellite-based time series shows that the September area
has decreased from 4.5*10^6 km^2 in 1979, to 2.8*10^6 km^2
in 2020. The decline has been approximately linear in global mean
surface temperature, with a rate of loss of 2.7*10^6 km^2 per
degree C of global warming. In the CMIP6 ensemble, however, we find that
the majority of the models that reach an Arctic sea-ice free state in
the SSP585 runs shows an accelerated loss of sea-ice for the last degree
of warming compared to the second last degree of warming, which implies
an increased sensitivity of the sea-ice to temperature changes. Both in
the observational and CMIP6 data, we find that the decline in September
sea-ice area is approximately proportional to the area north of which
the zonal average temperature in spring and summer is lower than a
critical threshold Tc. The Arctic amplification implies that the zonally
averaged temperatures increase relative to the global temperatures, and
with rates increasing with latitude. Linear extrapolation of the zonally
averaged temperatures predicts that, with further warming, the September
sea-ice area will depend non-linearly on global temperature, the
sensitivity will increase and the September sea-ice area may become less
that 1*10^6 km^2 for global warming between 0.9 and 1.6 degrees C
above the current temperature. As a result of accelerated sea-ice loss,
the average evolution of the sea-ice area among the CMIP6 models before
the loss of the summer sea-ice shows an increase in the year-to-year
fluctuations in minimum ice cover in the next decade. This implies
exceptional accumulation of extreme events with very low or no sea-ice
at all even before the final loss of the sea-ice. Likewise, an apparent
short-term recovery of the sea-ice loss might be observable due to the
increasing fluctuations.