Midwinter Arctic leads form and dissipate low clouds

Xia Li (), Steven K. Krueger, Courtenay Strong, Gerald G. Mace and Sally Benson
Additional contact information
Xia Li: University of Utah
Steven K. Krueger: University of Utah
Courtenay Strong: University of Utah
Gerald G. Mace: University of Utah
Sally Benson: University of Utah

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Leads are a key feature of the Arctic ice pack during the winter owing to their substantial contribution to the surface energy balance. According to the present understanding, enhanced heat and moisture fluxes from high lead concentrations tend to produce more boundary layer clouds. However, described here in our composite analyses of diverse surface- and satellite-based observations, we find that abundant boundary layer clouds are associated with low lead flux periods, while fewer boundary layer clouds are observed for high lead flux periods. Motivated by these counterintuitive results, we conducted three-dimensional cloud-resolving simulations to investigate the underlying physics. We find that newly frozen leads with large sensible heat flux but low latent heat flux tend to dissipate low clouds. This finding indicates that the observed high lead fractions likely consist of mostly newly frozen leads that reduce any pre-existing low-level cloudiness, which in turn decreases downwelling infrared flux and accelerates the freezing of sea ice.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-14074-5 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-14074-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-14074-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().