Identification

Title

The polar marine climate revisited

Abstract

As an additional classification to Köppen's climate classification for polar (E) climates, the Polar Marine (EM) climate was presented nearly five decades ago and is revisited in this paper. The EM climate was traced to the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and Southern Ocean and recognized as wet, cloudy, and windy, especially during winter. These areas by definition are encompassed by monthly mean air temperatures of -6.7°C (20°F) and 10°C (50°F) in the coldest and warmest months of the annual cycle, respectively. Here three global reanalyses [ECMWF Interim Re-Analysis (ERA-Interim), Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR), and Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) 25-yr reanalysis (JRA-25)] are used to produce a modern depiction of EM climate. General agreement is found between original and new EM boundaries, for which the poleward boundary can be approximated by the winter sea ice maximum and the equatorward boundary by the warmest month SSTs. Variability of these parameters is shown to largely dictate the EM area. A downward trend in global EM areal extent for 1979-2010 (-42.4 × 109 m2 yr-1) is dominated by the negative Northern Hemisphere (NH) EM trend (-45.7 × 109 m2 yr-1), whereas the Southern Hemisphere (SH) EM areal trend is insignificant. This observed reduction in NH EM areal extent of roughly 20% over the past three decades, largely from losses at the equatorward boundaries of these biologically rich EM zones, may not be fully compensated by poleward shifts in the EM environment due to projected warming and sea ice decline in the twenty-first century.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7js9r84

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2013-06-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

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Use constraints

Copyright 2013 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact