Master Thesis Defense by Mads Lundsgaard Andersen

Title: Sensitivity of winter climatic conditions in Europe to various surface forcing in the EC-Earth model

Abstract:
For the past decades, the temperature of the Arctic has risen at an alarming rate, which leads to overall reduction of Arctic sea ice. While Europe experiences overall milder winters, a few extremely cold events has occurred. This leads to an investigation of a potential link between the Arctic sea ice, more specific in the Barents-Kara area, and cold European winters.

This thesis aims to investigate this potential link using the atmospheric-only EC-Earth model. Here, an attempt was made to recreate an old experiment but with a better model with higher resolutions. The goal of the experiment is to systematically reduce the sea ice in the Barents-Kara area and see how it affect the European winter climate. The results showed that sea ice reductions might lead to colder European winters - the response showed a potential greater impact by only slightly reduced sea ice which was statistically significant, and overall weak impact for the temporal mean winter temperatures, which was not.

Supervisor: Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen
Censor: Peter Aakjær