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Arctic Cyclones and Their Interactions With the Declining Sea Ice: A Recent Climatology
Author(s) -
Valkonen E.,
Cassano J.,
Cassano E.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: atmospheres
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-8996
pISSN - 2169-897X
DOI - 10.1029/2020jd034366
Subject(s) - cyclone (programming language) , climatology , environmental science , cyclogenesis , sea ice , tropical cyclone , arctic , atmospheric sciences , meteorology , geology , oceanography , geography , field programmable gate array , computer science , computer hardware
In this study, we applied a cyclone tracking algorithm to multiple reanalyses and categorized the detected cyclones based on season, intensity, and sea ice state to provide an Arctic cyclone climatology with emphasis on cyclone‐sea ice interactions over the Arctic Ocean and adjacent waters. Our study period is from 1979 to 2015 and the reanalyses we are using are ERA‐Interim, ERA5, and CFSR. As for our intensity variable, we use Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE), which has commonly been used as an intensity metric in the tropics but has not been utilized for high latitudes before. ACE has the advantage that it relates the cyclone intensity to the kinetic energy of the cyclone and therefore better represents the cyclone impact/interaction with the surface. We performed comparisons with the other more commonly used intensity metrics to assess the use of the ACE metric in the Arctic. Our main findings include increased cyclone counts with higher trends toward the end of the study period. Cold season cyclone counts were also found to be related to decreased sea ice concentration throughout the year. We also show that there is a relationship between the cyclone intensity measured by ACE and the surface state. Less sea ice was shown to be related to higher cyclone intensities. Comparisons between the the three reanalysis data sets are also presented.