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Interaction between Arctic sea ice and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation in a warming climate

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Abstract

Tentative evidence suggests that the contraction of Arctic sea ice and the slowdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) may have already started in the 1970 or 1980s, which raises the question of how changes in these two key climate components are connected across different timescales. Here, we investigate two-way interactions between Arctic sea ice and AMOC variations using a broad suite of models and climate simulations, including those from the CMIP5 and CMIP6 datasets. Our analysis of preindustrial simulations suggests that Arctic sea ice loss can drive an AMOC slowdown after a multi-decadal delay primarily through the downstream propagation of positive buoyancy (warm/low salinity) anomalies spreading from the Arctic to the subpolar North Atlantic and suppressing deep convection. The AMOC weakening on the other hand acts to expand Arctic sea ice cover within several years via a reduction in northward oceanic heat transport. Analyzing greenhouse-warming simulations, further we show that these interactions should operate under anthropogenic global warming, affecting future projections for Arctic sea ice and the AMOC.

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Data availability

The HadISST.2 sea ice data are publicly available at https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst2/data/. The NASA GISTEMP v4 data are publicly available at https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/. The CMIP5/6 data are publicly available through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/esgf-llnl/. The CESM-LE data are publicly available on the Earth System Grid (ESG) https://www.earthsystemgrid.org. The CESM1-CN Arctic sea ice perturbation experiment data are available on request from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

W.L. has been supported by the Regents’ Faculty Fellowship, by the Alfred P. Sloan. Foundation as a Research Fellow and by US National Science Foundation (AGS-2053121, OCE 2123422). A.V.F. has been supported by grants from the DOE Office of Science (DE-SC0016538), NSF (OCE-1756682, OPP-1741841) and the ARCHANGE project (ANR-18-MPGA-0001, France).

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  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California Riverside, 900 University Ave, Riverside, CA, 92501, USA

    Wei Liu

  2. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Alexey Fedorov

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  1. Wei Liu
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  2. Alexey Fedorov
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Correspondence to Wei Liu.

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Liu, W., Fedorov, A. Interaction between Arctic sea ice and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation in a warming climate. Clim Dyn 58, 1811–1827 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05993-5

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