Changing seasonal sea ice predictor relationships in a changing Arctic climate

However, with rapid changes occurring in the Arctic climate, it is unclear whether these statistical relationships will remain valid. Here, preindustrial control, present-day control, and 20th-21st century climate model integrations are used to assess predictors for end-of-summer ice extent under various and changing climate conditions.

Of importance for future forecasting systems, we find that the variance of September extent anomalies explained by winter-spring sea ice predictors, such as the area of Arctic basin thin ice cover, increases during the transition to a seasonally ice-covered Arctic. In contrast, summer atmospheric circulation variability plays a decreasingly important role in explaining the end-of-summer ice cover anomalies. These changes are primarily related to climate-dependent changes in the location of summer sea ice anomalies.