Perspectives on limitations and mechanisms for atmospheric initiation of onset of the summer melt season over sea ice

Onset of surface melt over sea ice is a factor in the duration of the melt season. Onset is often triggered by advection of warm, moist air from lower latitudes. This is especially characteristic of early dates of onset, but such events have also been hypothesized to precondition the ice for an earlier onset even when they don’t act as the trigger. The importance of atmospheric advection to the melt season is well-recognized by the community. Less attention has been given to the potential limitations of these events and to what alternate mechanisms may also be important for initiation, which is the subject of this presentation. We discuss two case studies.

In the first case, atmospheric advection from the North Atlantic in late May 2020 caused onset to occur over a wide area of the sea ice north of Greenland, including the floe being measured by the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition. Approximately 6 weeks prior, in April, an anomalously warm advection event also impacted the MOSAiC floe and was responsible for ~40% of the total warming the ice underwent that spring. Using a diffusion model for the ice forced by surface temperatures that both include (observationally) and exclude (synthetically) the April event, we show that its influence relative to its absence was reduced by ~80% within 10 days. The result is explained by a negative feedback that suppresses conduction within the ice when warming events occur. Consequently, despite the apparent influential nature of the April event suggested by the observations, the ice temperatures would likely have been similar several weeks before onset if the April event had not occurred. This implies there are limitations to such events in preconditioning the sea ice for early onset.

Our second case examines data collected from a buoy in the Beaufort Sea during a regional onset event observed in June 2022. In this case, the air that caused melt at the buoy came from the north during a period of generally zonal flow of the polar jet (and lack of poleward moisture transport). Analysis of back trajectories indicates that the air had a residence time in the Arctic of 7-10 days prior to causing melt. The air began at mid-tropospheric levels near the pole then circulated around persistent, large-scale high pressure over the East Siberian Sea, descending along its track. Reanalysis data suggests the adiabatic contribution to the subsidence was sufficient to warm the air to the freezing point when it reached the surface, moving southward across the Beaufort Sea. This case indicates that subsidence is a mechanism internal to the Arctic that is capable of causing melt onset, though its climatological significance remains an open question.