An approach for projecting the timing of abrupt winter Arctic sea ice loss

Abstract

Abrupt and irreversible winter Arctic sea ice loss may occur under anthropogenic warming due to the disappearance of a sea ice equilibrium at a threshold value of CO2, commonly referred to as a tipping point. Previous work has been unable to conclusively identify whether a tipping point in winter Arctic sea ice exists because fully coupled climate models are too computationally expensive to run to equilibrium for many CO2 values. Here, we explore the deviation of sea ice from its equilibrium state under realistic rates of CO2 increase to demonstrate for the first time how a few time-dependent CO2 experiments can be used to predict the existence and timing of sea ice tipping points without running the model to steady state. This study highlights the inefficacy of using a single experiment with slow-changing CO2 to discover changes in the sea ice steady state and provides a novel alternate method that can be developed for the identification of tipping points in realistic climate models.