Antarctic shelf ocean warming and sea ice melt affected by projected El Niño changes

作者：W. Cai, Fan Jia, Shujun Li, A. Purich, Guojian Wang, Lixin Wu, Bolan Gan, A. Santoso, T. Geng, B. Ng, Yun Yang, D. Ferreira, G. Meehl, M. Mcphaden · 发表于：Nature Climate Change · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1038/s41558-023-01610-x · 被引用次数：39

How the shelf ocean around Antarctica changes with warming is not well known. Here, the authors show that a projected increase in El Niño–Southern Oscillation variability accelerates warming of the Antarctic shelf ocean but slows warming around the sea ice edges, thus influencing ice melt. Antarctic shelf ocean warming affects melt of ice shelf/sheets and sea ice but projected changes vary vastly across climate models. A projected increase in El Niño variability has been found to slow future mid-latitude Southern Ocean warming but how this impacts the Antarctic shelf ocean is unknown. Here we show that a projected increase in El Niño variability accelerates Antarctic shelf ocean warming, hastening ice shelf/sheet melt but slowing sea ice reduction.