A publication of preliminary results from the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) on Arctic climate change appears in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The CRC Transregio, led by meteorologist Professor Manfred Wendisch from the University of Leipzig, is now in its second funding period. Other CRC Transregio participants are the Universities of Bremen and Cologne, as well as the Alfred Wegener Institute in Leipzig, the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Studies (AWI) and the Leibniz Tropospheric Research Institute (TROPOS).

“The picture on the cover is a kind of international award for the work of our entire team,” says Professor Wendish. “The publication will help make our results even more visible beyond a narrow circle of experts to the entire international community of meteorologists, oceanographers and climatologists.”

The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world. This phenomenon is known as arctic amplification. To understand this warming, the Transregional Collaborative Research Center (AC) was established in 2016³. It includes modeling and data analysis as well as observational elements.

The project produced a large amount of ground, weather, sea and satellite data on the physical, chemical and meteorological properties of the Arctic atmosphere, cryosphere and upper ocean available to the Arctic climate research community. Only about 1,700 datasets are stored in a freely available research data server managed by the University of Bremen and the Alfred Wegener Institute. Global unified atmosphere-ocean models are constantly being developed within the framework of the Joint Research Centre.

The scientists used existing and new data to identify short-term changes and signs of long-term trends in Arctic climate variables. For example, they found that the Arctic atmosphere was significantly wetter and regional storm activity increased. Winter warming has increased in areas around Svalbard and the Arctic, resulting in a reduction in sea ice thickness and snow-on-ice depth in the Fram Strait.

To better correlate results in the future, the researchers develop cross-cutting themes to answer key questions in four key areas: delay frequency feedback, surface processes, Arctic mixed-phase clouds, and air mass transport and transformation. Source