Category Archives: Arctic

How to improve a climate model: a 24-year journey from observing melt ponds to their inclusion in climate simulations

By: David Schroeder Melt ponds are puddles of water that form on top of sea ice when the snow and ice melts (see Figure). Not all the water drains immediately into the ocean, but it can stay and accumulate on … Continue reading

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Flying Through Storms To Understand Their Interaction with Sea Ice: The Arctic Summer-time Cyclones Project and Field Campaign

By: Ambrogio Volonté Arctic cyclones are the leading type of severe weather system affecting the Arctic Ocean and surrounding land in the summer. They can have serious impacts on sea-ice movement, sometimes resulting in ‘Very Rapid Ice Loss Events’, which … Continue reading

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Oceanic Influences On Arctic And Antarctic Sea Ice

By: Jake Aylmer The futures of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice are difficult to pin down in part due to climate model uncertainty. Recent work reveals different ocean behaviours that have a critical impact on sea ice, highlighting a potential … Continue reading

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The Devil Is In The Details, Even Below Zero

By: Ivo Pasmans  An anniversary is coming up in the family and I had decided to create a digital photo collage. In the process I was scanning a youth photo and noticed that the scan looked a lot less refined … Continue reading

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Antarctic Sea Ice: The Global Climate Driver Of The South

By: Holly Ayres In the Northern Hemisphere, our closest region of sea ice (not to be confused with land ice) is the Arctic, a vast region of frozen ocean at the North Pole. Antarctica, a huge mountainous land mass at … Continue reading

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Why should we care about sea ice floes?

By: Adam Bateson One of the most frequently used visual devices to illustrate climate change is that of a polar bear on sea ice surrounded by open ocean (Fig. 1). Polar bears are today identified as a vulnerable species, with sea ice decline the … Continue reading

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The Future of Arctic Sea Ice

By: Rebecca Frew It is well documented in scientific studies and the news (recent example here) that the summer extent of Arctic sea ice has been declining rapidly in response to global warming. As the summer sea ice shrinks and … Continue reading

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Cold Winter Weather: Despite or Because of Global Warming?

By: Marlene Kretschmer This year’s winter was cold. There was heavy snowfall across the UK, Europe and parts of the United States including Texas. This severe weather came with significant societal and economic impacts. Every time cold extremes like this … Continue reading

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Are Eurasian winter cooling and Arctic Sea ice loss dynamically connected?

By: Rohit Gosh The observed sea ice concentration (SIC) in the Arctic has been declining in recent decades. Temperatures have been rising all over the planet, but warming has been much faster over the Arctic, a phenomenon known as Arctic … Continue reading

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Science outreach in coastal Arctic communities

By: Lucia Hosekova Figure 1: NASA image by Robert Simmon based on Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) surface temperature analysis data including ship and buoy data from the Hadley Centre. Caption by Adam Voiland. Few people are more aware … Continue reading

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