Influence of the Gulf Stream on the Barents Sea ice retreat and Eurasian coldness during early winter

By Kazutoshi Sato, J. Inoue, Masahiro Watanabe. 2014

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abnormal sea-ice retreat over the Barents Sea during early winter has been considered a leading driver of recent midlatitude severe winters over Eurasia. However, causal relationships between such retreat and the atmospheric circulation anomalies remains uncertain. Using a reanalysis dataset, we found that poleward shift of a sea surface temperature front over the Gulf Stream likely induces warm southerly advection and consequent sea-ice decline over the Barents Sea sector, and a cold anomaly over Eurasia via planetary waves triggered over the Gulf Stream region. The above mechanism is supported by the steady atmospheric response to the diabatic heating anomalies over the Gulf Stream region obtained with a linear baroclinic model. The remote atmospheric response from the Gulf Stream would be amplified over the Barents Sea region via interacting with sea-ice anomaly, promoting the warm Arctic and cold Eurasian pattern.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d36d5bc7a71c4ced1a7e461aac717835a79cc3f2

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Citations in the corpus

Persistent Extratropical Regimes and Climate Extremes (2015, background): “For example, Sato et al [78] presented a Rossby wave train originating over the Gulf Stream which warmed the Barents-Kara Sea through downwards surface heat fluxes and then arched south leading to high pressure over Eurasia.”
Extreme cyclone events in the Arctic: Wintertime variability and trends (2017, background): “The land-sea mask is illustrated as a black line. additional moisture uptake in cyclone development and intensification [e.g. Magnusdottir et al 2004, Sato et al 2014].”