Rise and fall of sea ice production in the Arctic Ocean’s ice factories

The volume, extent and age of Arctic sea ice is in decline, yet winter sea ice production appears to have been increasing, despite Arctic warming being most intense during winter. Previous work suggests that further warming will at some point lead to a decline in ice production, however a consistent explanation of both rise and fall is hitherto missing. Here, we investigate these driving factors through a simple linear model for ice production. We focus on the Kara and Laptev seas-sometimes referred to as Arctic “ice factories” for their outsized role in ice production, and train the model on internal variability across the Community Earth System Model’s Large Ensemble (CESM-LE). The linear model is highly skilful at explaining internal variability and can also explain the forced rise-then-fall of ice production, providing insight into the competing drivers of change. We apply our linear model to the same climate variables from observation-based data; the resulting estimate of ice production over recent decades suggests that, just as in CESM-LE, we are currently passing the peak of ice production in the Kara and Laptev seas.