Global and Arctic climate sensitivity enhanced by changes in North Pacific heat flux

Summer Praetorius (), Maria Rugenstein, Geeta Persad and Ken Caldeira
Additional contact information
Summer Praetorius: United States Geological Survey
Maria Rugenstein: ETH Zurich
Geeta Persad: Carnegie Institution for Science
Ken Caldeira: Carnegie Institution for Science

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract Arctic amplification is a consequence of surface albedo, cloud, and temperature feedbacks, as well as poleward oceanic and atmospheric heat transport. However, the relative impact of changes in sea surface temperature (SST) patterns and ocean heat flux sourced from different regions on Arctic temperatures are not well constrained. We modify ocean-to-atmosphere heat fluxes in the North Pacific and North Atlantic in a climate model to determine the sensitivity of Arctic temperatures to zonal heterogeneities in northern hemisphere SST patterns. Both positive and negative ocean heat flux perturbations from the North Pacific result in greater global and Arctic surface air temperature anomalies than equivalent magnitude perturbations from the North Atlantic; a response we primarily attribute to greater moisture flux from the subpolar extratropics to Arctic. Enhanced poleward latent heat and moisture transport drive sea-ice retreat and low-cloud formation in the Arctic, amplifying Arctic surface warming through the ice-albedo feedback and infrared warming effect of low clouds. Our results imply that global climate sensitivity may be dependent on patterns of ocean heat flux in the northern hemisphere.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05337-8 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:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-05337-8

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05337-8

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 ().