Processes controlling the transition to a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean in a warming world

Abstract: Observations show dramatic Arctic sea ice loss and Arctic warming in recent decades. As greenhouse gases increase and the Earth’s surface warms, projecting when the Arctic Ocean may become ice-free, and the resulting impacts is of broad interest to those living in the Arctic and beyond. Numerical coupled models are the main tool for making such future projections. Yet, projecting sea ice loss is hard with these tools because it is challenging to constrain physical process uncertainty, unpredictable climate variability, and differences in climate drivers. In this talk, I will present an overview of research over last decade analyzing processes controlling the transition to a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean in a warming world. Motivated by this overview, I will present recent work published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (https://doi.org/10.1029/2021MS002679) in which we analyzed the influence of surface sea ice surface melt on Arctic Ocean phase while also controlling for all other confounding factors such as the amount of global warming and unpredictable climate variability.