Potential for Arctic Sea Ice Cover Response to Changing Atlantic Inflow

Increasingly warm Atlantic Water inflow has been linked to decreased sea ice cover in the Barents Sea. The heat brought in by the Atlantic Water contains enough heat to melt all the sea ice in the Arctic. However, the strong Arctic halocline successfully traps the heat well below the sea ice. With retreating ice cover and changing Atlantic Water inflow, it is not clear to what extent that will still hold true in the future. We use a moderately high-resolution ocean-sea ice model with realistic bathymetry, but idealized forcing cycles, to study the change in vertical heat flux to the sea ice from the Atlantic layer through the halocline for various Atlantic inflow scenarios. We show how far the influence of the Atlantic Water reaches, how that affects the sea ice, and how that depends on varying forcing conditions.