The impact of a seasonally ice free Arctic Ocean on the temperature, precipitation and surface mass balance of Svalbard

The observed decline in summer sea ice extent since the 1970s is predicted to continue until the Arctic Ocean is seasonally ice free during the 21st Century. This will lead to a much perturbed Arctic climate with large changes in ocean surface energy flux. Svalbard, located on the present day sea ice edge, contains many low lying ice caps and glaciers and is expected to experience rapid warming over the 21st Century. The total sea level rise if all the land ice on Svalbard were to melt completely is 0.02 m. The purpose of this study is to quantify the impact of climate change on Svalbard’s surface mass balance (SMB) and to determine, in particular, what proportion of the projected changes in precipitation and SMB are a result of changes to the Arctic sea ice cover. To investigate this a regional climate model was forced with monthly mean climatologies of sea surface temperature (SST) and sea ice concentration for the periods 1961–1990 and 2061–2090 under two emission scenarios. In a novel forcing experiment, 20th Century SSTs and 21st Century sea ice were used to force one simulation to investigate the role of sea ice forcing. This experiment results in a 3.5 m water equivalent increase in Svalbard’s SMB compared to the present day. This is because over 50 % of the projected increase in winter precipitation over Svalbard under the A1B emissions scenario is due to an increase in lower atmosphere moisture content associated with evaporation from the ice free ocean. These results indicate that increases in precipitation due to sea ice decline may act to moderate mass loss from Svalbard’s glaciers due to future Arctic warming

Diagnosing the controls on desert dust emissions through the Phanerozoic

Desert dust is a key component of the climate system, as it influences Earth's radiative balance and biogeochemical cycles. It is also influenced by multiple aspects of the climate system, such as surface winds, vegetation cover, and surface moisture. As such, geological records of dust deposition or dust sources are important palaeoclimate indicators; for example, dust records can be used to decipher aridity changes over time. However, there are no comprehensive records of global dust variations on tectonic timescales (tens of millions of years). Furthermore, although some modelling studies have focused on particular time periods of Earth's history, there has also been very little modelling work on these long timescales. In this study, we establish for the first time a continuous model-derived time series of global dust emissions over the whole Phanerozoic (the last 540 million years). We develop and tune a new offline dust emission model, DUSTY1.0, driven by the climate model HadCM3L. Our results quantitatively reveal substantial fluctuations in dust emissions over the Phanerozoic, with high emissions in the late Permian to Early Jurassic (× 4 pre-industrial levels) and low emissions in the Devonian–Carboniferous (× 0.1 pre-industrial levels). We diagnose the relative contributions from the various factors driving dust emissions and identify that the non-vegetated area plays a dominant role in dust emissions. The mechanisms of palaeohydrological variations, specifically the variations in low-precipitation-induced aridity, which primarily control the non-vegetated area, are then diagnosed. Our results show that palaeogeography is the ultimate dominating forcing, with dust emission variations explained by indices reflecting the land-to-sea distance of tropical and subtropical latitudes, whereas CO2 plays a marginal role. We evaluate our simulations by comparing them with sediment records and find reasonable agreement. This study contributes a quantified and continuous dust emission reconstruction and an understanding of the mechanisms driving palaeohydroclimate and dust changes over Earth's Phanerozoic history.</p

Climate model and proxy data constraints on ocean warming across the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Constraining the greenhouse gas forcing, climatic warming and estimates of climate sensitivity across ancient large transient warming events is a major challenge to the palaeoclimate research community. Here we provide a new compilation and synthesis of the available marine proxy temperature data across the largest of these hyperthermals, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This includes the application of consistent temperature calibrations to all data, including the most recent set of calibrations for archaeal lipid-derived palaeothermometry. This compilation provides the basis for an informed discussion of the likely range of PETM warming, the biases present in the existing record and an initial assessment of the geographical pattern of PETM ocean warming. To aid interpretation of the geographic variability of the proxy-derived estimates of PETM warming, we present a comparison of this data with the patterns of warming produced by high pCO2 simulations of Eocene climates using the Hadley Centre atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) HadCM3L. On the basis of this comparison and taking into account the patterns of intermediate-water warming we estimate that the global mean surface temperature anomaly for the PETM is within the range of 4 to 5°C

A simulated Northern Hemisphere terrestrial climate dataset for the past 60,000 years (vol 6, 265, 2019)

Peer reviewe

The mechanisms that determine the response of the Northern Hemisphere’s stationary waves to North American Ice Sheets

Stationary waves describe the persistent meanders in the west–east flow of the extratropical atmosphere. Here, changes in stationary waves caused by ice sheets over North America are examined and the underlying mechanisms are discussed. Three experiment sets are presented showing the stationary wave response to the albedo or topography of ice sheets, as well as the albedo and topography in combination, as the forcings evolve from 21 to 6 ka. It is found that although the wintertime stationary waves have the largest amplitude, changes due to an ice sheet are equally large in summer and winter. In summer, ice sheet albedo is the dominant cause of changes: topography alone gives an opposite response to realistic ice sheets including albedo and topography. In winter, over the Atlantic, stationary wave changes are due to the ice sheet topography; over the Pacific, they are due to the persistence of summertime changes, mediated by changes in the ocean circulation. It is found that the response of stationary waves over the last deglaciation echoes the above conclusions, with no evidence of abrupt shifts in atmospheric circulation. The response linearly weakens as the albedo and height decrease from 21 to 10 ka. As potential applications, the seasonal cycle over Greenland is shown to be sensitive primarily to changes in summer climate caused by the stationary waves; the annual mean circulation over the North Pacific is found to result from summertime, albedo-forced, stationary wave effects persisting throughout the year because of ocean dynamics.publishedVersio

Reassessing the Value of Regional Climate Modeling Using Paleoclimate Simulations

Regional climate models (RCMs) are often assumed to be more skillful compared to lower-resolution general circulation models (GCM). However, RCMs are driven by input from coarser resolution GCMs, which may introduce biases. This study employs versions of the HadAMB3 GCM at three resolutions (>50 km) to investigate the added value of higher resolution using identically configured simulations of the preindustrial (PI), mid-Holocene, and Last Glacial Maximum. The RCM shows improved PI climatology compared to the coarse-resolution GCM and enhanced paleoanomalies in the jet stream and storm tracks. However, there is no apparent improvement when compared to proxy reconstructions. In the high-resolution GCM, accuracy in PI climate and atmospheric anomalies are enhanced despite its intermediate resolution. This indicates that synoptic and mesoscale features in a RCM are influenced by its low-resolution input, which impacts the simulated climatology. This challenges the paradigm that RCMs improve the representation of climate conditions and change.Peer reviewe