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Assessment reveals sea ice and temperature shifts significantly influence polar lows in forecasts, suggesting vital model improvements.
Polar mesocyclones are often the cause of sudden worsening of weather conditions, including strong winds, snowfall with low visibility, and storms. The short lifetime, rapid development, high movement speeds, and small sizes, combined with a lack of meteorological observations over the Arctic seas, create difficulties in forecasting associated weather phenomena. High-resolution numerical modeling can help address this issue. The emergence and development of polar lows (PLs) significantly depend on the properties of the underlying surface, which largely determine the dynamic properties of the atmosphere in the boundary layer. This article is dedicated to assessing the sensitivity of the configuration ICON-Ru of the model ICON with a 2.0 km grid spacing to changes in the sea ice boundary and sea surface temperature (SST) when forecasting the formation and development of PLs. The results showed that the presence of artificial ice in the model almost completely suppresses the development of PLs in cases where the vortex does not have a strong connection with the jet stream. Heating the SST to 278.15 K while simultaneously shifting the ice boundary northward leads to increased thermal instability, rising sensible and latent heat fluxes, and higher CAPE, which enhances PLs, with the degree of enhancement depending on the nature of the vortex formation itself.
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Revokatova et al. (2025) studied this question.
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