Arctic Ocean’s salinity balance at risk, new model shows
DOE/LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., February 24, 2021–The Beaufort Sea, the Arctic Ocean’s largest freshwater reservoir, has increased its freshwater content by 40 percent over the last two decades, putting global climate patterns at risk. A rapid release of this freshwater into the Atlantic Ocean could wreak havoc on the delicate climate balance that dictates global climate.
“A freshwater release of this size into the subpolar North Atlantic could impact a critical circulation pattern, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which has a significant influence on northern-hemisphere climate,” said Wilbert Weijer, a Los Alamos National Laboratory author on the project.
A joint modeling study by Los Alamos researchers and collaborators from the University of Washington and NOAA dove into the mechanics surrounding this scenario. The team initially studied a previous release event that occurred between 1983 and 1995, and using virtual dye tracers and numerical modeling, the researchers simulated the ocean circulation and followed the spread of the freshwater release.
“People have already spent a lot of time studying why the Beaufort Sea freshwater has gotten so high in the past few decades,” said lead author Jiaxu Zhang, who began the work during her post-doctoral fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Center for Nonlinear Studies. She is now at UW’s Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies. “But they rarely care where the freshwater goes, and we think that’s a much more important problem.”
The study was the most detailed and sophisticated of its kind, lending numerical insights into the decrease of salinity in specific ocean areas as well as the routes of freshwater release. The experiment unexpectedly showed that most of the freshwater reaches the North Atlantic (the Labrador Sea) through a narrow set of passages between Canada and Greenland, called the Canadian Archipelago.
The traditional view had mostly considered liquid freshwater transport in the form of sea ice via the Fram Strait (a passage between Greenland and Svalbard). The freshwater release was shown to significantly reduce the salinities in the Labrador Sea–a freshening of 0.2 practical salinity units (psu) on the western shelves and 0.4 psu locally in the Labrador Current.
However, the modeled release was based on freshwater volumes of the past, from the 1990s. Now, that volume is significantly greater, more than 23,300 cubic kilometers, owing to an unusually persistent circulation pattern called the Beaufort Gyre and to unprecedented sea ice decline. If this very large volume of freshwater is released into the North Atlantic, the impacts could be correspondingly very large as well. The exact impact is still unknown. “Our study of the previous release event offers a picture into the potential impacts of a future, larger release,” Weijer said.
The model used in the study was also partly developed at Los Alamos. It is the Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 0 (E3SMv0), which incorporates LANL’s Parallel Ocean Program (POP) and its powerful sea ice model, CICE.
“This work is a great example of Los Alamos’s innovative ocean modeling approaches; and it also demonstrates the Laboratory’s leadership in high-latitude climate science through projects such as the High-Latitude Application and Testing of Earth Systems Models (HiLAT-RASM),” Weijer said.
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The paper: “Labrador Sea freshening linked to Beaufort Gyre freshwater release.” Nature Communications. Jiaxu Zhang, Wilbert Weijer, Michael Steele, Wei Cheng, Tarun Verma, and Milena Veneziani. DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-21470-3
The funding: This research was funded by the U.S. DOE Office of Science, a LANL LDRD award, a CNLS postdoc fellowship award, and the NOAA.
About Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is managed by Triad, a public service oriented, national security science organization equally owned by its three founding members: Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), and the Regents of the University of California (UC) for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.
LA-UR-21-21767
And the salt and fresh on top waters don’t mix for weeks? Any actual measurements of the progress of this fresh water through the Labrador Sea?
“…unpresented sea ice decline.”? Dye transport via simulation? They can’t help themselves, they need to get in some appeal for more funding. I actually suspect that large events have climate impacts, it’s just that they are on the more chaotic side of climate cycles it is hard to predict their impact.
They need help with their heads. Really do ##
Eyeballing their ‘dye’ graphic, is the water not circulating, anticlockwise, around Greenland?
Seems to me it gets caught up in the Gulf Stream (GS) south of Newfoundland and carried East-North-East and through the gap between Scotland and Iceland and thence back into the Arctic Ocean
Thus ## .. their own model says this stuff is going nowhere (no problemo) so, how is that a problem to they themselves?
Why so relentlessly negative in everything they see?
The other or actual problem is Big Numberism.
NB When I mention ‘cube’ or ‘cubes’, I’m talking cubic metres or, as we’re dealing water, tonnes.
Quote:
“”The Beaufort Sea, the Arctic Ocean’s largest freshwater reservoir, has increased its freshwater content by 40 percent over the last two decades“”
Makes perfect sense. Ice forms in the Arctic winter, melts to fresh water in the summer, goes round the loop to meet more melted ice some months or years later and then: repeats repeats repeats.
Quote:
“”more than 23,300 cubic kilometers”” ###
Important parts are ‘2 decades‘ and ‘23,300‘
As I recall from ages ago, the GS starts at Florida at 30 Million cubes per sec and gets up to 150 cubes as it goes past Iceland
No matter, ‘search’ tells us:
“”The Gulf Stream transports nearly four billion cubic feet of water per second, an amount greater than that carried by all of the world’s rivers combined.”
Say a cube is roughly 35 cubic feet so….
I get that to 114 million cubes per second.
Nice mid-point for my numbers
The potential for mathematical fail here is huge, do check it, but I get that the GS is moving their (paltry) 23,300 km3 every 57 hours
They have amassed an amount of water over a period of 20 years, and the Gulf Stream can flush it all away inside 2 and a half days.
Even worse, the Gulf Stream itself, by their own model, created that lump of water.
choose your own words……
### btw: What is a ‘cubic kilometer‘
A meter is a measuring instrument – not an indication of size or volume.
How can these people and or their reviewers make any claim to be ‘scientists’?
“### btw: What is a ‘cubic kilometer‘
A meter is a measuring instrument – not an indication of size or volume.
How can these people and or their reviewers make any claim to be ‘scientists’?”
____________________
A kilometer is 1,000 meters. So a cubic kilometer, in this case, means a volume of water that would be contained within a cube that has 1,000 x 1,000 meter sides. 1 billion cubic meters. Cubic kilometers is a unit commonly used to describe large volumes of water. What do you find unscientific about it?
He means that the word ‘meter ‘in British English means a measuring device. The distance is a metre, hence kilometre. Indeed, not all of us are that sophysticated.
Sophysticated, why that ?
Our (Geman) measurig device is called “inch stick” = Zollstock.
I see there no reason for any gasping when using the unit cubic kilometers or in short km³ – as TheFinalNail nailed it 😀
Americans brutalise yet an another spelling…
Word should be kilometre …
But somehow kilometer as become acceptable !
“The model used in the study”
Sorry. All bets are off.
Maybe world Socialism could fix it…
As your tea leaf reader and spiritual adviser, I predict that you have a bright future as a tenured professor of climate science at Penn State or Yale or the University of East Anglia.
“If this very large volume of freshwater is released into the North Atlantic, the impacts could be correspondingly very large as well. The exact impact is still unknown.”
Yikes! It may be what flips the earth from its long warming to the next Ice Age. I vote we seed the Beaufort Gyre with salt off land on the precautionary principle. South Oz has a lot of big crusty salt pans that Gaia in one of her moods dumped there so pop the UN cheque in the mail and we’ll get cracking on it right away-
ANCIENT GIANT UNDERWATER REEF FOUND IN NORTH FLINDERS – Coober Pedy Regional Times (cooberpedytimes.com)
Salt of the Earth Incorporated is only too happy to help save the planet.
Aren’t most reefs found underwater?
well its obviously happened before so what happened?
oh yeah sweet fa it would appear
“The exact impact is still unknown.”
“But they rarely care where the freshwater goes, and we think that’s a much more important problem.”
Why is a process that science does not understand identified by a model relying on ‘virtual dye’ a problem? Every unknown is not a problem so enough of the NOAA alarmism please.
When the phenomenon is linked to the jet stream, oceans oscillations, geo-thermal radiation, cloud formation, solar radiation and the Milankovich Effect, then I will be interested.
It seems they are beginning to identify the mechanism that leads to a reversal of the AMO by slowing down the AMOC. This remains unresolved in the ocean circulation community. Climate scientists might call this a “negative feedback”.
During a negative AMO these reverses apparently happen every 5 to 7 years.
(Correlation, Causeation, Chicken Egg??)
“Sophisticated” and “powerful” are the word choices that make it worthy of placing Los Alamos on the watch list all right.
Yes, it has happened before but….what is not mentioned in the paper is that the gyre has been spinning in the same direction for much longer than ever recorded before and so has amassed a far larger amount of cold fresh water. The effects of ejecting this southwards are unknown.
Zhang confirms NAO….but extrapolates “crisis” instead of when reversal would be expected….the easy way to funding the next study….clisci’s are a self-serving lot….
How does salt get into the Arctic Ocean? Unlike tropical and temperate oceans, into which rivers flow year-round, the Arctic Ocean only receives water from rivers in late spring and summer, and they are frozen the rest of the year.
The other possible source of salt is transport of water from other oceans, with the largest being the Gulf Stream current between Greenland and Norway bringing relatively warm, salty water over the north coast of Scandinavia, then eastward along the Russian coast. There would be relatively little exchange of water between the Pacific and Arctic through the Bering Strait.
Animations of sea ice cover as a function of season for many years in a row repeatedly show a pattern of the area between Greenland and Norway remaining ice-free most of the year, and the area along the Arctic coast of western Russia tends to freeze last in the autumn, and melt first in the spring. The coasts of eastern Siberia, Alaska, and the Canadian archipelago tend to freeze earlier in autumn and melt later in spring.
This would suggest that warmer Atlantic water entering the Arctic via the Gulf Stream tends to circulate toward the east, forming an eddy just east of Scandinavia, then continue eastward along the Russian coast, then along the north coast of Alaska, then to the Canadian archipelago, forming a counter-clockwise current in the Arctic around the North Pole.
The water would lose heat as it circulates in polar waters, due to the lack of sunlight and ice cover, which would reflect sunlight, so that the areas north of Alaska and Canada would be colder. As the water gets colder, the solubility of salt decreases, and some salt would precipitate on the sea bottom near the Canadian archipelago.
Water entering the Arctic via the Gulf Stream would have to leave the Arctic somewhere, some southward through the Bering Strait into the Pacific, and a larger volume southeastward along the Labrador coast (the cold Labrador current).
It is therefore not surprising that the area north of the Canadian archipelago, and the Labrador Strait have less salt than the area along the Russian coast. But if the water in that area is becoming fresher (less salty), since fresh water has a higher freezing point than salt water, this would cause sea ice to form earlier in autumn and melt later in spring.
More fresh water in the Arctic might actually be good for the polar bears!
It’s not only Rahmsdorf of Potsdam who’s saying that the AMOC is weakening.
Here’s two more studies with the same conclusion published in 2018 (in terms of ocean circulation timescales, practically yesterday).
North Atlantic circulation slows down (nature.com)
The really hilarious thing about the AMOC (apart from the conspiracists who don’t believe in it) is that the warmists think that they can have it both ways and not look like idiots.
You see according to the doomsters, a slowing down AMOC caused warming.
While a speeding up AMOC also causes warming.
And presumably a staying-the-same locked down AMOC would also cause OMG warming.
In the real world faster AMOC moves more heat from equator to pole and brings warming (AMO warm phase) while the slowing AMOC reduces poleward heat transport and brings cooling (AMO cool phase).That’s what’s starting to happen now.
I recall 10 or more years ago this whole thing about fresh water slowing the AMOC was put to rest
Practical salinity units is parts per thousand for the rest of us. So the change is 0.2% less than the typical 3.5 wt% salt (mostly sodium chloride), or 3.3 wt% salt. Normal seawater can vary from 3.2 wt% to 3.8 wt% depending on location and other factors. I remain unconcerned, although I complain about inventing new scales (practical salinity units) that are the essentially the same as perfectly good and well-accepted scales like weight percent.
” the delicate climate balance that dictates global climate.”
Has anyone actually proved that the balance is delicate? What do they mean by “delicate” anyway?
Put yourself in the climate changer shoes. You’re interfering with their climate and you’re doomed unless you follow their prescriptions. You look at their prescriptions and think I’m doomed anyway. That’s the delicate part for them.
“modeled” “might” “could” indicates another fairy tale.
Nuff said.
This appears to be the attempt to make an insignificant something into a significant something and a stretch at that.