Characteristics of Arctic storms and their influence on surface climate

Yang Yang
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:33:34 PDT

Impacts of intense synoptic storms on Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea surface environmental conditions are examined, focusing on storms moving into the regions with northward and eastward pathways. Both storms alter the prevailing northeasterly wind to southerly and southwesterly wind. The storms moving from the East Siberian Sea that follow a west to east route are most active in summer and have the longest duration. Increasing southwesterly wind plays a key role in the decline of thin sea ice within the warm season. Storms traveling from the relatively warm Pacific Ocean into the Arctic over the Bering Strait are more common in winter, and are typically more intense than the summer storms that propagate west to east. Downward longwave radiation increases considerably with the passage of intense winter storms over the ice-covered Chukchi Sea; the sea ice concentration decreases accordingly. The impact of different sea ice conditions on Arctic synoptic storm systems in autumn are investigated in the North Pacific and Atlantic sectors, based on the ten ensembles of hindcast simulations from coupled regional climate model HIRHAM-NAOSIM. In both the Pacific and Atlantic sectors, greater transfers of heat and moisture fluxes from the open ocean to the atmosphere occur in low sea ice years than in high sea ice years. The largest increase of upward heat fluxes and baroclinicity occurs over the Laptev, southern Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in the Pacific sector, and over the southern Greenland and Barents Seas in the Atlantic sector. Enhanced baroclinity plays a dominant role in the development of intense storm systems. Therefore, storms in reduced sea ice years are more intense than in enhanced sea ice years in both Atlantic and Pacific sectors. The storm count also increases over locations exhibiting high baroclinicity. Sea ice volume anomalies are significantly correlated with synoptic storm counts based on maximum covariance analysis (MCA) leading modes of covariance between sea ice volume and storm count over Pacific and Atlantic sectors are identified respectively. The results are consistent with our findings in the composite analysis. In the Pacific sector, the first pattern of the MCA demonstrates that increasing storm counts over the Laptev Sea corresponds to decreasing sea ice volume over that region. In the Atlantic sector, the decrease of sea ice volume is highly correlated with decreasing storm counts over the northern Greenland Sea. Connection of storm activity over the North Pacific Ocean with the tropical stratosphere quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) is investigated following a composite analysis of intense storm vertical cross sections. An observed stronger potential vorticity anomaly of intense storms is associated with the QBO west phase and results in enhanced warm air advection near the surface. A warm core structure forms over the east or northeast direction relative to the surface low center, which bows the isentropes downward. Upward motion following the isentropes reduces the surface low pressure, which in turn, facilitate storms to keep propagating in east and northeast directions. Under the QBO east phase, a weak surface warm core forms to the southeast of the storm center, resulting in a slow development of the storms, and these storms tend to move southeastward.