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Arctic sea-ice loss fuels extreme European snowfall

Nature Geoscience volume 14, pages 283–288 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

The loss of Arctic sea-ice has been implicated with severe cold and snowy mid-latitude winters. However, the mechanisms and a direct link remain elusive due to limited observational evidence. Here we present atmospheric water vapour isotope measurements from Arctic Finland during ‘the Beast from the East’—a severe anticyclonic outbreak that brought heavy snowfall and freezing across Europe in February 2018. We find that an anomalously warm Barents Sea, with a 60% ice-free surface, supplied up to 9.3 mm d−1 moisture flux to this cold northeasterly airflow. We demonstrate that approximately 140 gigatonnes of water was evaporated from the Barents Sea during the event, potentially supplying up to 88% of the corresponding fresh snow over northern Europe. Reanalysis data show that from 1979 to 2020, net March evaporation across the Barents Sea increased by approximately 70 kg per square metre of sea-ice lost (r2 = 0.73, P < 0.01), concurrent with a 1.6 mm (water equivalent) per year increase in Europe’s maximum snowfall. Our analysis directly links Arctic sea-ice loss with increased evaporation and extreme snowfall, and signifies that by 2080, an Atlantified ice-free Barents Sea will be a major source of winter moisture for continental Europe.

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Fig. 1: Synoptic climatology during the Beast from the East.
Fig. 2: Observations during winter 2017–18.
Fig. 3: Barents Sea moisture advection to Northern Europe.
Fig. 4: Historical Arctic sea-ice and atmospheric moisture links.

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Data availability

Pallas meteorological data are available at https://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/download-observations. Stable isotope and mixing ratio data presented in Fig. 2 are available in the Supplementary Data file and on the Zenodo repository (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4452714). Gridded ERA5 and GDAS reanalysis data are available from https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/ and https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datasets/global-data-assimilation-system-gdas. Sea-ice data are available from https://nsidc.org/data. NAO index data are available from: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/nao.shtml. GlobSnow 3.0 data are available from: http://www.globsnow.info/swe/archive_v3.0/.

Code availability

R-language scripts used to post-process the Picarro data are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Academy of Finland (Grant 316014) and a University of the Arctic (UArctic) Research Chairship to J.M.W. The University of Oulu and Academy of Finland PROFI 4 (Grant 318930) provided additional research support through the Arctic Interactions project. H.B. acknowledges support from a UArctic Postdoctoral Fellowship. A.H. acknowledges support from the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme (Grant 223259). The authors thank J. Hatakka and the Finnish Meteorological Institute and staff working at the Sammaltunturi Station. V. Hyöky (Metsähallitus) helped maintain the Picarro instrumentation and assisted with the humidity–isotope calibrations. P. Ala-aho assisted during the December 2017 field campaign. The NOAA Air Resources Laboratory is acknowledged for the provision of the HYSPLIT model used in this publication. Lastly, we thank J.-L. Bonne and J. Cohen for constructive comments on this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ecology and Genetics Research Unit, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Hannah Bailey, Kaisa-Riikka Mustonen & Jeffrey M. Welker

  2. Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate, Department of Geosciences, UiT the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Alun Hubbard

  3. Department of Geological Sciences, University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, AK, USA

    Eric S. Klein

  4. Institut des Géosciences et l’Environnement, National Centre for Scientific Research, Grenoble, France

    Pete D. Akers

  5. Water, Energy and Environmental Engineering Research Unit, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Hannu Marttila

  6. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, AK, USA

    Jeffrey M. Welker

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Contributions

H.B. conducted the research, created the figures and wrote the manuscript. J.M.W. was the project’s principal investigator. H.B., A.H., E.S.K. and J.M.W. conceived and designed the study. J.M.W., E.S.K., K.-R.M. and H.M. conducted the fieldwork. K-R.M., E.S.K., H.M. and P.D.A. performed and/or contributed to the isotope data measurements and post-processing. H.B. and A.H. performed the back-trajectory and long-term analyses. All authors contributed comments and/or revisions to the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Hannah Bailey.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Geoscience thanks Judah Cohen, Jean-Louis Bonne and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Tom Richardson.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–7.

Supplementary Data 1

Pallas water vapour data.

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Bailey, H., Hubbard, A., Klein, E.S. et al. Arctic sea-ice loss fuels extreme European snowfall. Nat. Geosci. 14, 283–288 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00719-y

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