The Arctic is warming and its sea ice cover is transitioning to a thinner, younger and faster seasonal sea ice. This in turn drives a positive feedback of increased radiative forcing leading to further warming. One possible lever to restoring the Arctic sea ice could be through enhancing the sea ice albedo artificially as shown by Field et al (2018) using reflective hollow glass spheres with low environmental impact (see Field et al (2018, 2019) and Bhattacharyya et al (2018, 2019)). These studies show that although such a technology may be a viable instrument for restoring Arctic ice, deploying it Arctic-wide may be cost prohibitive. A localized targeted deployment of the technology may be more practicable and cost effective. Since the Fram Strait is the largest gateway of Arctic sea ice export, in this paper we study the climate impact of a strategic localized application of this technology over a 100,000 km^2 area of the Fram Strait. We design a nine member ensemble of fully interactive climate model CESM1.2 in 1 degree resolution, initializing from different phases of the Arctic Oscillation. We present here the impact of the increase in sea ice albedo in the Fram Strait on the Arctic sea ice cover, radiation budgets and atmospheric dynamics.
References:
Field, L., Ivanova, D., Bhattacharyya, S., Mlaker, V., Sholtz, A., Decca, R., et al. (2018). “Increasing Arctic sea ice albedo using localized reversible geoengineering”. Earth’s Future, 6. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018EF000820
Field, L. and A. Sholtz (2019), Poster, “First Do No Harm” Approaches to Restoring Arctic Albedo. AGU Fall Meeting, https://doi.org/10.1002/essoar.10503108.1
Bhattacharyya S., Ivanova D., Mlaker V., Field L., (2019), Poster, “Modeling and assessing impact of artificially enhancing the Arctic Sea Ice Albedo”, AGU Fall Meeting,
https://www.essoar.org/doi/abs/10.1002/essoar.10500552.1
Bhattacharyya S., Ivanova D., Mlaker V., Field L., (2018), Poster,
“Modeling and assessing impact of artificially enhancing the Arctic Sea Ice Albedo”. AGU Fall Meeting, https://www.essoar.org/doi/pdf/10.1002/essoar.10500552.1
