Low clouds suppress Arctic air formation and amplify high-latitude continental winter warming

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Timothy W Cronin, Eli Tziperman

Abstract

High-latitude continents have warmed much more rapidly in recent decades than the rest of the globe, especially in winter, and the maintenance of warm, frost-free conditions in continental interiors in winter has been a long-standing problem of past equable climates. We use an idealized single-column atmospheric model across a range of conditions to study the polar night process of air mass transformation from high-latitude maritime air, with a prescribed initial temperature profile, to much colder high-latitude continental air. We find that a low-cloud feedback--consisting of a robust increase in the duration of optically thick liquid clouds with warming of the initial state--slows radiative cooling of the surface and amplifies continental warming. This low-cloud feedback increases the continental surface air temperature by roughly two degrees for each degree increase of the initial maritime surface air temperature, effectively suppressing Arctic air formation. The time it takes for the surface air temperature to drop below freezing increases nonlinearly to ∼ 10 d for initial maritime surface air temperatures of 20 °C. These results, supplemented by an analysis of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 climate model run...Continue Reading

References

May 28, 1992·Nature·L C SloanJ C Zachos
Jul 16, 2014·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Nathan P ArnoldEli Tziperman

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