Decadal Climate Change in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, A Representative Area of the Arctic

Abstract

In recent decades, global warming hiatus/slowdown has attracted considerable attention and has been strongly debated. Many studies suggested that the Arctic is undergoing rapid warming and significantly contributes to a continual global warming trend rather than a hiatus. In this study, we evaluated the climate changes of Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, a representative location of the northern North Atlantic sector of the Arctic, based on observational records from 1975–2014. The results showed that the annual warming rate was four times higher than the global mean (+0.76 °C·decade−1) and was also much greater than Arctic average. Additionally, the warming trend of Ny-Ålesund started to slow down since 2005–2006, and our estimates showed that there is a 8–9 years-lagged, but significant, correlation between records of Ny-Ålesund and global HadCRUT4 datasets. This finding indicates that the Arctic was likely experiencing a hiatus pattern, which just appeared later than the low-mid latitudes due to transport processes of atmospheric circulations and ocean currents, heat storage effect of cryospheric components, multidecadal variability of Arctic cyclone activities, etc. This case study provides a new perspective on the global warming hiatus/slowdown debate.

Keywords

• Arctic
• Arctic rapid warming
• global warming hiatus
• global warming slowdown