Trends in latent and sensible heat fluxes over the oceans surrounding the Arctic Ocean

The trends in latent and sensible heat fluxes (LHF and SHF) over the oceans surrounding the Arctic Ocean and the contributions of the Arctic Oscillation, the Arctic dipole anomaly, the third principal component, and the Pacific-North American pattern on them are investigated using the objectively analyzed air-sea fluxes (OAFlux) dataset from 1979 to 2008. Significant positive trends in LHF appear over western and northern European coasts and the coast of the Aleutian Islands, especially in autumn. Besides in summer, autumn and winter positive trends in LHF also exist over the coast of the western North Pacific Ocean; in summer, there is also a patch of positive trends over the central North Atlantic Ocean. On the contrary, negative trends in LHF change greatly in a year. There are main negative trend centers over the Barents Sea, the coast of northeast Canada, the Bering Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, and Hudson Bay, especially in summer and autumn. Trends in SHF are similar to those in LHF except for a small difference in area. There are significant correlations between the four indices and both LHF and SHF over these oceanic regions which result mainly from strong relationships between the sea–air-specific humidity and temperature differences and the four indices. The four indices only explain a small portion of the trends in LHF and SHF. The trends in air-sea-specific humidity and temperature differences are more closely associated with those in LHF and SHF than those in wind speed.