Covariance between Arctic sea ice and clouds within atmospheric state regimes at the satellite footprint level.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the cloud response to sea ice change is necessary for modeling Arctic climate. Previous work has primarily addressed this problem from the interannual variability perspective. This paper provides a refined perspective of sea ice-cloud relationship in the Arctic using a satellite footprint-level quantification of the covariance between sea ice and Arctic low cloud properties from NASA A-Train active remote sensing data. The covariances between Arctic low cloud properties and sea ice concentration are quantified by first partitioning each footprint into four atmospheric regimes defined using thresholds of lower tropospheric stability and midtropospheric vertical velocity. Significant regional variability in the cloud properties is found within the atmospheric regimes indicating

SUBMITTER: Taylor PC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5070557 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature