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  • Matters Arising
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Is sea-ice-driven Eurasian cooling too weak in models?

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 934–936 (2019)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 26 November 2019

The Original Article was published on 14 January 2019

arising from M. Mori et al. Nature Climate Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0379-3 (2019)

In a recent Letter, Mori et al.1 examined connections in observations and climate models between reduced Arctic sea ice and the ‘warm Arctic and cold Eurasia’ (WACE) pattern. They concluded that models systemically underestimate Eurasian cooling in response to sea-ice loss, relative to observations. If correct, their result implies that up to half of the observed Eurasian cooling from 1995–2014 is attributable to sea-ice loss1, whereas previous studies have found a negligible contribution from sea-ice loss2,3,4. Here, we highlight that their comparisons between observations and models are not like-for-like, and show that when fair comparisons are made, modelled and observed estimates are consistent with each other. The upward adjustment of the contribution of sea-ice loss to observed Eurasian cooling in Mori et al.1 is therefore unjustified.

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Fig. 1: Observed and modelled estimates of the total and sea-ice-driven WACE variance.

Data availability

The FACTS and CESM simulations are freely available and were obtained from the following repositories: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/repository/facts and https://www.cesm.ucar.edu/projects/community-projects/LENS/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank M. Mori for providing data from the MIROC simulations and for useful discussions. We acknowledge the individuals and modelling groups that contributed to the Facility for Climate Assessments (FACTS) multimodel dataset and the CESM Large Ensemble Project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    James A. Screen & Russell Blackport

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  1. James A. Screen
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Contributions

J.A.S and R.B. jointly conceived the analysis. R.B. created Fig. 1. J.A.S. wrote the manuscript with input from R.B.

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Correspondence to James A. Screen.

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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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Screen, J.A., Blackport, R. Is sea-ice-driven Eurasian cooling too weak in models?. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 934–936 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0635-1

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