By: Daniela Flocco
News of broken temperature records, droughts and extreme climate events are nowadays constantly present in newspapers and on social media. The study of the connection between extreme and global climate changes has become subject of an area of research called ‘extreme event attribution’, defined as the science of detecting whether anthropogenic (human-made) global warming contributed to the occurrence of extreme events. Scientists at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have produced yearly reports since 2011 with the scope of explaining the causes of the previous year’s extreme events (see www.climate.gov for more details).
Extreme climatic events have become of wide interest for their economic consequences, especially when they concern urban areas of the globe (Frame et al. 2020). The anthropogenic impact on extreme events can be also observed in less populated regions such as the Poles, even though it is more difficult to estimate its “cost” in the short term. A recent study (Kirchmeier-Young, et al., 2017) looked at the recent extreme Arctic sea ice September minima (focusing on the record-minimum of 2012) and assessed the human impact on these events. They found that the occurrence of extreme sea ice extent minima is consistent with a scenario including anthropogenic influence and is extremely unlikely in a scenario excluding anthropogenic influence. They also state that the inclusion of anthropogenic forcing is a necessary but not a sufficient cause at present to explain the observed sea ice extent lows.
Attribution of extreme events is strongly based on statistical studies of model forecasts and therefore relies on high resolution, physically-sophisticated models. This is particularly challenging in a changing climate where the parameterization of physical processes need to be able to capture the behaviour of unprecedented scenarios and produce representative results. In fact, the statistical analysis needed for event attribution requires climate models that have skills in forecasting the expected behaviour with respect to less predictable, rare events (Nature News, 2012).
Researchers are engaged in a common effort to improve models performance and assess it. An example of how the improvement of the physics in a sea ice model can lead to improvement in prediction skills is work that our group (Centre for Polar Observations and Modelling), has carried out during the past few years: the implementation of a melt pond parameterization in the sea ice component of a global climate model and the analysis of the consequent improvements (Flocco et al., 2012, Schröder et al., 2014).
Figure 1: Melt ponds on Arctic sea ice (©NASA/Kate Ramsayer).
Changes in the Arctic and the Antarctic are faster and amplified with respect to the lower latitudes. A contributor of the ‘polar amplification’ is the so called the ice-albedo feedback: sea ice reflects almost entirely the solar radiation because of its high reflectance (albedo). When sea ice melts, larger areas of the ocean become exposed to sunlight; these absorb large part of the solar radiation inducing further melt. This is true also on the sea ice itself where melt ponds, puddles of water forming in spring in topographic lows from sea ice and snow melt, cause a strong increase in sea ice melt forming more melt ponds (Fig. 1). This process links the presence of ponds, in particular in the early melt season, to the amount of summer ice melt and consequently the amplitude of the minimum ice extent in September.
Figure 2: Annual cycle of Arctic mean fraction of sea-ice area covered by exposed melt-ponds in our CICE simulation. (Schroeder et al., 2014).
Figure 3: Predicted ice extent verified by use of SSM/I data for the period 1979–2013 (Schroeder et al., 2014).
The presence of melt pond on sea ice has increased over the past decades (Fig. 2), making it crucial to develop a parameterization suitable for a climate model that would be able to deal with a changing sea ice state. In fact, the increase in melt pond presence could be thought of as a proxy for air temperature rise. The inclusion of the new melt pond physical description allows skilful predictions of the sea ice extent minima in September depending on the presence of melt ponds in May (Fig. 3) and in particular, the improved model was able to predict with high confidence the sea ice extent minimum of 2012.
References
Flocco, D., D. Schröder, D. L. Feltham, and E. C. Hunke, 2012: Impact of melt ponds on Arctic sea ice simulations from 1990 to 2007, J. Geophys. Res. 117, C9, https://doi.org/10.1029/2012JC008195
Frame, D.J., M. F. Wehner, I. Noy, and S. M. Rosier, 2020: The economic costs of Hurricane Harvey attributable to climate change. Climatic Change 160, 271–281, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02692-8.
Kirchmeier-Young, M. C., F. W. Zwiers, and N. P. Gillett, 2017: Attribution of Extreme Events in Arctic Sea Ice Extent. J. Climate, 30, 553–571, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0412.1.
Schröder, D., D. Feltham, D. Flocco, and M. Tsamados, 2014: September Arctic sea-ice minimum predicted by spring melt-pond fraction. Nat. Climate Change, 4, 353–357, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2203.
Nature news: Nature 489, 335–336 (20 September 2012) doi:10.1038/489335b