Thank you John. After a more careful reread it appears that (if I understand your comment) you’re correct that the study links “multidecadal” variability of Arctic Amplification (AA) to sea ice, and not sea ice directly to extreme climate events (as my understanding is also that current climate models are not able to capture “intra -multidecadal” impacts of AA on extreme climate very well). But the second part of this link from AA to the extreme climate effects that we are witnessing is alluded to in the paper in the quote from lead author Aiguo Dai:
“This is because sea surface anomalies in the North Atlantic and affect atmospheric circulation patterns over Europe, North America, West Africa and South America, leading to temperature and precipitation changes in these regions”
Best,
Ron
Sent from my iPhone
Hi Ron,
My hopes were raised by the conclusions of this paper, but I am disappointed by its content. The sea ice is indeed critical to weather extremes, but it is through driving Arctic Amplification. AA reduces the Arctic-tropics temperature gradient, disrupting jet stream behaviour and making it tend to get stuck in places for weeks, thus amplifying hot or wet weather to create severe droughts or floods respectively, as we witnessed so dramatically last year in US and China respectively. This behaviour is not captured in models, as noted by Michael Mann no less. But it is one of several reasons why the Arctic needs to be refrozen as quickly as possible, another being sea level rise from land ice meltdown.
Cheers, John