The Arctic and Antarctic regions have undergone profound changes over the observational period, with the polar and subpolar climates playing a critical role in regulating the Earth’s energy and water budget. These changes can have detrimental effects on the unique ecosystems and the marine carbon cycle at regional to global scales. The complex processes driving these changes operate on a wide spectrum of time scales, requiring insights from various research fields to unravel the underlying mechanisms, drivers, and impacts across the land-ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere continuum of the polar regions.
This session invites contributions from various disciplines that address Arctic and Antarctic variability and change across all time scales, using observational (remote and in-situ), historical, and geological data, along with proxy records, model simulations and climate forecasts for the past, present and future. The common denominator of these studies will be their focus on a better understanding of multi-scale mechanisms and feedbacks that drive polar climate change and their broader impact on local and global climate and society. Key areas of interest for discussion include the improvement of climate predictions at high latitudes at various time scales (e.g., usage of additional observations for initialization, improved initialization methods, improved parameterizations, novel verification approaches, etc.) and the study of potential teleconnections involving lower latitudes (such as the AMOC).
Contributions that explore high-resolution modelling, climate feedbacks and tipping points, and attribution analyses are particularly welcome, along with studies that investigate long-term polar climate change across different possible future emission scenarios. Additionally, this session seeks to highlight what past warm climates can teach us about future polar and subpolar climates. We encourage submissions linking high-latitude climate variability, change, predictions, and projections to potential ecological and socio-economic impacts.