Arctic Ocean Response to Greenland Sea Wind Anomalies in a Suite of Model Simulations

Morven Muilwijk*, Mehmet Ilicak, Sam B. Cornish, Sergey Danilov, Renske Gelderloos, Rüdiger Gerdes, Verena Haid, Thomas W.N. Haine, Helen L. Johnson, Yavor Kostov, Tamás Kovács, Camille Lique, Juliana M. Marson, Paul G. Myers, Jeffery Scott, Lars H. Smedsrud, Claude Talandier, Qiang Wang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

36 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Multimodel Arctic Ocean “climate response function” experiments are analyzed in order to explore the effects of anomalous wind forcing over the Greenland Sea (GS) on poleward ocean heat transport, Atlantic Water (AW) pathways, and the extent of Arctic sea ice. Particular emphasis is placed on the sensitivity of the AW circulation to anomalously strong or weak GS winds in relation to natural variability, the latter manifested as part of the North Atlantic Oscillation. We find that anomalously strong (weak) GS wind forcing, comparable in strength to a strong positive (negative) North Atlantic Oscillation index, results in an intensification (weakening) of the poleward AW flow, extending from south of the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre, through the Nordic Seas, and all the way into the Canadian Basin. Reconstructions made utilizing the calculated climate response functions explain ∼50% of the simulated AW flow variance; this is the proportion of variability that can be explained by GS wind forcing. In the Barents and Kara Seas, there is a clear relationship between the wind-driven anomalous AW inflow and the sea ice extent. Most of the anomalous AW heat is lost to the atmosphere, and loss of sea ice in the Barents Sea results in even more heat loss to the atmosphere, and thus effective ocean cooling. Release of passive tracers in a subset of the suite of models reveals differences in circulation patterns and shows that the flow of AW in the Arctic Ocean is highly dependent on the wind stress in the Nordic Seas.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)6286-6322
Number of pages37
JournalJournal of Geophysical Research: Oceans
Volume124
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2019

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
©2019. The Authors.

Funding

The first author is particularly grateful to Prof. John Marshall and Prof. Helge Drange for constructive discussions and comments that helped to improve the manuscript, Evangelia Efstathiou for good suggestions, and the consortium supporting the development of the NorESM model. M. M. and L. H. S. were supported by the Centre for Climate Dynamics at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. M. I. was partially supported by the ITU (ITU‐TGA‐2017‐40657). Computing resources used in this work for ITU was provided by the National Center for High Performance Computing of Turkey (UHeM) under Grant 5004782017. R. Gelderloos and TWNH were financially supported by NOAA Grant NA15OAR4310172. C. L., C. T., and V. H. were supported through the projects ArcticMix, supported by the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS), and FREDY, supported by the French LEFE/INSU program. Q. W. was supported by the Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM. T. K. and R. Gerdes are supported by the cooperative project 03F0729E (RACE II, Regional Atlantic Circulation and Global Climate), funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). R. G. gratefully acknowledges funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), Projektnummer 268020496, TRR 172, within the Transregional Collaborative Research Center “ArctiC Amplification: Climate Relevant Atmospheric and SurfaCe Processes, and Feedback Mechanisms” (AC). S. C., H. J., and Y. K. are grateful for funding from the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council, via the UK‐OSNAP project (NE/K010948/1) and a DTP studentship. The HiGEM coupled climate model data are available from NERC's Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA; http://badc.nerc.ac.uk ). This model was developed from the Met Office Hadley Centre Model by the U.K. High‐Resolution Modelling (HiGEM) Project and the U.K. Japan Climate Collaboration (UJCC). HiGEM was supported by a NERC High Resolution Climate Modelling Grant (R8/H12/123). UJCC was supported by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Global Opportunities Fund, and jointly funded by NERC and the DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101). The HiGEM model integrations were performed using the Japanese Earth Simulator supercomputer, supported by JAMSTEC. The work of Pier Luigi Vidale and Malcolm Roberts in leading the effort in Japan is particularly valued. The Alberta team gratefully acknowledge the financial and logistic support of grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada (RGPIN 04357 and RGPCC 433898), as well as Polar Knowledge Canada (PKC‐NST‐1617‐0003). We are grateful to the NEMO development team and the Drakkar project for providing the model and continuous guidance and to Westgrid and Compute Canada for computational resources. For more details on the Alberta configuration, visit http://knossos.eas.ualberta.ca/anha/anhatable.php . An extracted set of time series from the various model simulations that have been used to make the figures are made available on the Bjerknes Climate Data Center ( https://www.bcdc.no/ ).

FundersFunder number
Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service
Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate ProgrammeGA01101
FREDY
Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM03F0729E
National Center for High Performance Computing of Turkey
National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationNA15OAR4310172
Department of Energy and Climate Change
Polar Knowledge CanadaPKC‐NST‐1617‐0003
Ulusal Yüksek Başarımlı Hesaplama Merkezi, Istanbul Teknik Üniversitesi5004782017
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaRGPCC 433898, RGPIN 04357
Natural Environment Research CouncilNE/K010948/1, R8/H12/123
Deutsche ForschungsgemeinschaftTRR 172, 268020496
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
Norges ForskningsrådITU‐TGA‐2017‐40657
Bjerknessenteret for klimaforskning, Universitetet i Bergen

    Keywords

    • Arctic Ocean
    • Atlantic Water
    • FAMOS
    • model intercomparison
    • sea ice
    • wind forcing

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