When Will Arctic Sea Ice Disappear? Projections of Area, Extent, Thickness, and Volume
Abstract
Rapidly diminishing Arctic summer sea ice is a strong signal of the pace of global climate change. We provide point, interval, and density forecasts for four measures of Arctic sea ice: area, extent, thickness, and volume. Importantly, we enforce the joint constraint that these measures must simultaneously arrive at an ice-free Arctic. We apply this constrained joint forecast procedure to models relating sea ice to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and models relating sea ice directly to time. The resulting "carbon-trend" and "time-trend" projections are mutually consistent and predict a nearly ice-free summer Arctic Ocean by the mid-2030s with an 80% probability. Moreover, the carbon-trend projections show that global adoption of a lower carbon path would likely delay the arrival of a seasonally ice-free Arctic by only a few years.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2203.04040,
title = {When Will Arctic Sea Ice Disappear? Projections of Area, Extent, Thickness, and Volume},
author = {Francis X. Diebold and Glenn D. Rudebusch and Maximilian Goebel and Philippe Goulet Coulombe and Boyuan Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.04040},
year = {2023}
}