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Breaking the Ice: Exploring the Changing Dynamics of Winter Breakup Events in the Beaufort Sea
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  • Jonathan Winfield Rheinlaender,
  • Heather C Regan,
  • Pierre Rampal,
  • Guillaume Boutin,
  • Einar Olason,
  • Richard Davy
Jonathan Winfield Rheinlaender
Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Heather C Regan
NERSC
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Pierre Rampal
Institut des Geosciences de l'Environnement, UGA
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Guillaume Boutin
NERSC
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Einar Olason
Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center
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Richard Davy
NERSC
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Abstract

The Beaufort Sea has experienced a significant decline in sea ice, with thinner first-year ice replacing thicker multi-year ice. This transition makes the ice cover weaker and more mobile, making it more vulnerable to breakup during winter. Using a coupled ocean-sea-ice model, we investigated the impact of these changes on sea-ice breakup events and lead formation from 2000 to 2018. The simulation shows an increasing trend in the Beaufort Sea lead area fraction during winter, with a pronounced transition around 2007. A high lead area fraction in winter promotes a significant growth of new, thin ice within the Beaufort region while also leading to enhanced sea ice transport out of the area. The export offsets ice growth, resulting in negative volume anomalies and preconditioning a thinner and weaker ice pack at the end of the cool season. Our results indicate that large breakup events may become more frequent as the sea-ice cover thins and that such events only became common after 2007. This result highlights the need to represent these processes in global-scale climate models to improve projections of the Arctic.
31 Aug 2023Submitted to ESS Open Archive
11 Sep 2023Published in ESS Open Archive