Scientists discover the Arctic has three distinct climate zones
Baku, October 30, AZERTAC
A vast new aerosol dataset covering two decades and eight monitoring stations has revealed that the Arctic is not a single climate system but three distinct zones, each responding to warming in its own way, according to earth.com.
The Arctic is warming roughly four times faster than the global average. What almost no one has worked out until now is that “the Arctic” is doing at least three different things at once. A recent study draws on over 20 years of aerosol measurements from eight monitoring stations scattered across the Arctic. The measurements were combined with satellite data and AI-assisted mapping, to divide the Arctic into three zones with distinct atmospheric “personalities.” In one, warming could increase the number of particles that help clouds form. In another, those particles could become less abundant. For the third zone, the answer depends almost entirely on what happens at factories and in forests thousands of kilometers away. The research was led by Samuel De Xun Chua at the University of Helsinki. The team’s measurements were collected between 2003 and 2024.
The seeds are aerosol particles of just the right size and chemistry – cloud condensation nuclei, or CCN – around which water vapor condenses into droplets. Under suitable conditions, more CCN can produce more numerous, smaller cloud droplets, making clouds more reflective. In the tropics, CCN are usually abundant enough that adding or removing a few makes little difference. In the Arctic, concentrations can be so low that cloud formation is limited by particle scarcity. A small change in the aerosol budget can swing the energy balance of a region-sized stretch of ocean or ice. One important source of these particles is new particle formation. That means the spontaneous assembly of aerosol from gas-phase precursors. The precursors include iodine compounds from sea-ice melt, sulfur vapors from biological activity, and oxidation products from organic sources. The rate at which this happens varies with temperature, sunlight, humidity, and the availability of precursor gases. This means it varies across the Arctic in ways that prior research, limited by patchy station data and short time windows, could not fully map.
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