Abstract
The Barents-Kara Seas are the crucial regions to link the Arctic to the midlatitudes of Eurasia, and winter warm anomalies around these regions have been regarded as a primary reason for cold-Eurasia over the past decade. Thus, the role of cold-Eurasia in resulting Arctic warm anomalies remains unclear. Through observational analyses and simulation experiments forced by prescribed regional ground albedo in Eurasia, this study shows that cold-Eurasia can give rise to Arctic warm anomalies. Observational analyses suggest that winter warm anomalies over the Barents-Kara Seas are originated from atmospheric circulation anomalies in the mid- and high-latitudes and dominantly associated with the positive NAO and the strengthening of the Siberian high. The strengthened Siberian high well corresponds to a systematic northward shift of atmospheric circulation over northern Eurasia, the North Atlantic, and northern North America, leading to significant increases in the atmospheric total energy transport into the Barents-Kara Seas. All simulation experiments consistently demonstrate that a regional cooling directly contributes to Arctic warm anomalies, and sometimes the cooling enhances the Siberian high and generates positive 500-hPa height anomalies over around the Ural Mountains through atmospheric subsidence anomalies and energy propagations, leading to warm anomalies over the Barents-Kara Seas. The increase in winter Eurasian snow cover, as one of the crucial factors enhancing the ground albedo, would favor the occurrence of warm Arctic-cold Eurasia, and there is already evidence supporting this deduction. This study implies that on the interannual time scales, winter warm anomalies over the Barents-Kara Seas cannot simply be seen as the cause of winter cold-Eurasia.
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Data Availability
The NCEP-NCAR Reanalysis I dataset is available at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.pressure.html. The monthly mean NAO index and Niño3.4 SST index are downloaded from https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/. Monthly Eurasian snow cover area data are used from https://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/.
Change history
01 November 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06548-y
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Funding
We thank Dr. Qikai Yu for performing WACCM simulation experiments. This study is supported jointly by the Major Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 41790472), the National Key Basic Research Project of China (Grant 2019YFA0607002), the Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 41730959), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 41905058).
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Wu, B., Ding, S. Cold-Eurasia contributes to arctic warm anomalies. Clim Dyn 60, 4157–4172 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06445-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06445-4