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Reply to: Is sea-ice-driven Eurasian cooling too weak in models?

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 937–939 (2019)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 26 November 2019

replying to J. A. Screen et al. Nature Climate Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0635-1 (2019)

Screen and Blackport1 challenged the methodology that was used in Mori et al.2 to estimate the fractional variance in the warm Arctic–cold Eurasian (WACE) pattern driven by sea-ice variability in observations. Screen and Blackport concluded that the apparent discrepancy in sea-ice-related WACE variability between observations and atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs) can be explained by the lack of WACE influence on sea-ice anomalies, rather than underestimation of the sea-ice-forced signals in AGCMs. Here, we show that the difference between the conclusions in these two papers is rooted in different perspectives on sea ice–WACE coupling. Our argument below will highlight the different viewpoints between the two studies and justify our conclusion that AGCMs underrepresent the sea-ice-forced (or coupled) WACE variance due to the lack of atmosphere–ocean–ice coupling and potential model errors2.

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Fig. 1: Estimates of coupled and uncoupled components of winter-mean SAT and SLP anomalies associated with WACE.

Data availability

The CESM simulations are freely available and were obtained from the following repository: http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/projects/community-projects/LENS/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Screen for useful discussions. We acknowledge the CESM Large Ensemble Community Project. This work is supported by Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology through the Integrated Research Program for Advancing Climate Models and the Arctic Challenge for Sustainability (ArCS) Program, and by the Japan Society and Technology Agency through Belmont Forum CRA ‘InterDec’ and the Promotion of Science through KAKENHI grant no. JP19H01964.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Masato Mori, Yu Kosaka & Hisashi Nakamura

  2. Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan

    Masahiro Watanabe & Masahide Kimoto

  3. Faculty of Sustainable Design, University of Toyama, Toyama, Japan

    Bunmei Taguchi

Authors
  1. Masato Mori
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  2. Yu Kosaka
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  3. Masahiro Watanabe
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  4. Bunmei Taguchi
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  5. Hisashi Nakamura
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  6. Masahide Kimoto
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Contributions

M.M. and Y.K. performed analyses. M.M., Y.K., B.T. and H.N. wrote the manuscript with discussion and feedback from all authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Masato Mori.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Hans Chen, Yannick Peings and Qiuhong Tang for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Mori, M., Kosaka, Y., Watanabe, M. et al. Reply to: Is sea-ice-driven Eurasian cooling too weak in models?. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 937–939 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0636-0

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