Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 41 (2014): 961-968, doi:10.1002/2013GL058121.
Description:
Freshwater in the Arctic Ocean plays an important role in the regional ocean circulation, sea ice, and global climate. From salinity observed by a variety of platforms, we are able, for the first time, to estimate a statistically reliable liquid freshwater trend from monthly gridded fields over all upper Arctic Ocean basins. From 1992 to 2012 this trend was 600±300 km3 yr−1. A numerical model agrees very well with the observed freshwater changes. A decrease in salinity made up about two thirds of the freshwater trend and a thickening of the upper layer up to one third. The Arctic Ocean Oscillation index, a measure for the regional wind stress curl, correlated well with our freshwater time series. No clear relation to Arctic Oscillation or Arctic Dipole indices could be found. Following other observational studies, an increased Bering Strait freshwater import to the Arctic Ocean, a decreased Davis Strait export, and enhanced net sea ice melt could have played an important role in the freshwater trend we observed.
Description:
This work
was supported by the cooperative
project 03F0605E, funded by the
German Federal Ministry for Education
and Research (BMBF), and by
the European Union Sixth Framework
Programme project DAMOCLES, contract
018509GOCE.
Description:
2014-08-12
Keywords:
Arctic
;
Liquid freshwater
;
Observation
;
Model
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
Format:
text/plain
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