Nature 373, 503 - 506 (09 February 1995); doi:10.1038/373503a0

Modulation of hemispheric sea-ice cover by ENSO events

Per Gloersen

Oceans and Ice Branch, Laboratory for Hydrospheric Research, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA

THE El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a quasiperiodic vari-ation in climate which arises from a complex interaction between the tropical Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere¹. ENSO events, which occur every two to seven years, are the largest source of interannual variability of temperature and precipitation on a global scale, although their effects are most profound in the tropics¹. Observations of sea-ice margins have been used to monitor global climate changes on timescales of greater than a decade², and there is some evidence for interannual variations in records of sea-ice cover³. But short-term changes in sea-ice cover are masked by pronounced seasonal variations, making it difficult to correlate them with specific climate phenomena. Using a multiple-window harmonic analysis technique^4–8, I show here that time series of sea-ice cover from the Arctic and Antarctic contain statistically significant quasi-biennial and quasi-quadrennial periodicities that agree well with variations in the ENSO index. The response of sea ice to these two frequency components varies greatly for different regions.

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