Enhanced simulated early 21st century Arctic sea ice loss due to CMIP6 biomass burning emissions
The mechanisms underlying decadal variability in Arctic sea ice remain actively debated. Here, we ability in boreal biomass burning (BB) emissions strongly influences simulated Arctic sea ice on multidecadal time scales. In particular, we find that a strong acceleration in sea ice decline in the early 21st century in the Community Earth System Model version 2 (CESM2) is related to increased variability in prescribed BB emissions in the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) through summertime aerosol-cloud interactions. Furthermore, we find that more than half of the reported improvement in sea ice sensitivity to CO2 emissions and global warming from CMIP5 to CMIP6 can be attributed to the increased BB variability, at least in the CESM. These results highlight a new kind of uncertainty that needs to be considered when incorporating new observational data into model forcing while also raising questions about the role of BB emissions on the observed Arctic sea ice loss.
document
https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7r49vj8
eng
geoscientificInformation
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publication
2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
publication
2022-07-29T00:00:00Z
Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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