The photo is sourced from rscf.ru
Accelerated temperature increases in the Arctic are often associated with shrinking sea ice cover, as well as an influx of warm, moist air masses from lower latitudes. However, scientists had not been able to determine until recently what contribution each of these factors makes to the warming of the Arctic.
To fill this gap, the scientists from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute built a model based on air temperature data in the Northern Hemisphere between 1948 and 2020. The model takes into account changes in temperature from the Equator to the North Pole, the presence of vortices in the atmosphere and the general warming trend. The authors then compared actual data and modeling results for the past seven decades: the difference between the two sets of values reflected the contribution of air exchange to warming processes in the Arctic.
The contribution of air exchange between the subpolar part of the Northern Hemisphere (90–60 degrees north latitude) and the regions further south turned out to be 54%, reaching 66% from April to October. As for the exchange of air masses in a narrower zone, from the North Pole to the latitude of the possible distribution of polar air, the contribution of air mass transfer is 93%. A similar assessment for the high latitudes of the Arctic (90–70 degrees North latitude) produced the value of 74%, which the scientists believe to be linked to oceanic heat influx.
“We’ve found that the area of air exchange between the polar and adjacent latitudes changes depending on the season, and studied how it expands during the warming. Over the last decade, the expansion of interlatitudinal exchange has been confirmed by the increasing frequency of snowfalls and cold snaps in Saudi Arabia and the Sahara, where these phenomena have been reported almost every year since 2018. In the future, we plan to make a quantitative assessment of the contribution of ice cover reduction and natural exposures to the warming of the Arctic,” Genrikh Alekseev, one of the authors of the study and doctor of geography, is quoted as saying by the Russian Science Foundation.
