Summer surface air temperature proxies point to  near-sea-ice-free conditions in the Arctic at 127&thinsp;ka

Sime, Louise C.; Sivankutty, Rahul; Vallet-Malmierca, Irene; de Boer, Agatha M.; Sicard, Marie

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-883-2023

Articles | Volume 19, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-883-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-883-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 4

Research article

|

02 May 2023

Research article |

| 02 May 2023

Summer surface air temperature proxies point to near-sea-ice-free conditions in the Arctic at 127 ka

Louise C. Sime, Rahul Sivankutty, Irene Vallet-Malmierca, Agatha M. de Boer, and Marie Sicard

Data sets

Last Interglacial summer air temperature observations for the Arctic (Version 1.0) [Data set] M. V. Guarino and L. Sime https://doi.org/10.5285/9AB58D27-596A-472C-A13E-2DCD68612082

Model code and software

jbusecke/xMIP: v0.7.1 (v0.7.1) J. Busecke, M. Ritschel, E. Maroon, T. Nicholas, and readthedocs-assistant https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7519179

ProPlot (v0.9.5) L. B. D. Luke https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5602155

Short summary

It is not known if the Last Interglacial (LIG) experienced Arctic summers that were sea ice free: models show a wide spread in LIG Arctic temperature and sea ice results. Evaluation against sea ice markers is hampered by few observations. Here, an assessment of 11 climate model simulations against summer temperatures shows that the most skilful models have a 74 %–79 % reduction in LIG sea ice. The measurements of LIG areas indicate a likely mix of ice-free and near-ice-free LIG summers.