More clouds lead to more Arctic warming: new study

Opaque Arctic clouds over broken sea ice in May 2015 north of Svalbard, Norway. (PHOTO COURTESY OF WSU)

No matter what global commitments on climate change emerge from this week’s COP21 meetings in Paris — here’s one reality that won’t change: the Arctic is already showing the impact of climate change.

A new research study, released Dec. 10, shows how increases in cloud cover in the Arctic are actually speeding up the region’s warming.

“As the Arctic atmosphere warms and moistens, it better insulates the surface,” said Christopher Cox, lead author of a paper published in Nature Communications.

“While we expected this to reduce the influence from clouds, we find that clouds forming in the Arctic appear to further warm the surface, especially in the fall and winter,” Cox said in a Washington State University release on the study.

For their study, researchers analyzed measurements from three scientific research stations located at Barrow, Alaska, Eureka on Ellesmere Island, and Summit, Greenland.

They used climate modeling as well as observations to show that the effect is already occurring in the Arctic and is expected to increase in the future as the climate warms, the release said.

Some previous research had suggested that as the atmosphere warms and becomes moister, clouds can protect against warming.

While this is likely true on a global scale, the researchers said they found “a different behavior as temperature and humidity increase in the cold Arctic.”

In the Arctic, clouds warm the surface and actually amplify regional warming.

That’s because there is little sunlight in the Arctic in autumn and winter, so the insulating properties of clouds far outweigh their shading properties.

In other research, high cloud cover over the Arctic in early summer months has been linked to low sea ice in the Arctic Ocean later in the season.