The shrinking of Arctic-wide September sea ice extent is often cited as an indicator of modern climate change; however, the timing of seasonal sea ice retreat/advance and the length of the open-water period are often more relevant to stakeholders working at regional and local scales. Here we highlight changes in regional open-water periods at multiple warming thresholds. We show that, in the latest generation of models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), the open-water period lengthens by 63 days on average with 2 °C of global warming above the 1850-1900 average, and by over 90 days in several Arctic seas. Nearly the entire Arctic, including the Transpolar Sea Route, has at least 3 months of open water per year with 3.5 °C warming, and at least 6 months with 5 °C warming. Model bias compared to satellite data suggests that even such dramatic projections may be conservative. In several of the Arctic ocean basins, the period of open water without sea-ice cover will lengthen by more than 90 days under 2 oC of global warming, suggest analyses of the latest (CMIP6) climate model simulations.

Data and Resources

Documents

Related Collections and Datasets

Metadata

Field Value
Title Arctic open-water periods are projected to lengthen dramatically by 2100
Publication general type journal article
Project Name
Keyword Vocabulary
Keyword Vocabulary URL
Theme Cryosphere
Version 1.0
Publisher Springer Nature
Date Published 2021
DOI 10.1038/s43247-021-00183-x
Language
Field Value
Authors
Authors 1
Author Name
Crawford, Alex
Type of Name
Personal
Email
alex.crawford@umanitoba.ca
Affiliation
Centre for Earth Observation Science - University of Manitoba
ORCID ID
0000-0003-1561-290X
Authors 2
Author Name
Stroeve, Julienne
Type of Name
Personal
Email
juliene.stroeve@umanitoba.ca
Affiliation
Centre for Earth Observation Science - University of Manitoba
ORCID ID
0000-0001-7316-8320
Authors 3
Author Name
Smith, Abigail
Type of Name
Personal
Email
Affiliation
ORCID ID
Authors 4
Author Name
Jahn, Alexandra
Type of Name
Personal
Email
Affiliation
ORCID ID
Field Value
License Name Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Licence Type Open
Licence Schema Name SPDX
Licence URL https://spdx.org/licenses
Field Value
Awards
Awards 1
Funded by
Website
Funder Name
Funder Identifier Code
Funder Identifier Type
Funder Identifier Scheme
Grant Number