Extending the PAMIP protocol for assessing the climate response to regional sea ice change across all Arctic regions

Climate models predict that sea ice cover will shrink--even disappear-- in most regions of the Arctic basin by the end of the century, inducing local and remote responses in the surface climate via dynamical changes in the atmospheric circulation. The atmospheric-only experiment designed and performed within PAMIP can help us elucidate the dynamical mechanisms, as well as assess the importance of sea ice loss in individual sectors of the Arctic in driving Northern Hemisphere climate change. 

Using the atmosphere-only EC-EARTH3.3 model and using the same protocol as for the pan-Arctic and regional Barents/Kara and Okhotsk future sea-ice experiments, we ran 5 complementary regional experiments that include other regions of the Arctic: Central Arctic, Hudson-Labrador-Baffin, Irminger-GIN, Bering-Chukchi, and Beaufort-East-Siberian-Laptev sectors. First. we compare the spatial pattern of climate anomalies in those simulations, and we discuss the contribution of sea ice loss in each region to climate change over Europe, Siberia and North America.  One noticeable result that will be discussed is the strikingly different nature of the climate response to pan-Arctic sea ice loss when compared to any of the regional sea ice loss experiments; we conclude our presentation by discussing potential causes for this difference, and what it may imply when devising experiments with prescribed regional sea ice change in future projects.