Journal Article
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116, iss. 48, pp. 23947-23953, 2019
Authors
Rudong Zhang, Hailong Wang, Qiang Fu, Philip J. Rasch, Xuanji Wang
Abstract
Significance
Changes in snow cover, sea ice cover, and surface albedo over the Arctic are important for local warming and midlatitude climate change. Here, multiple datasets are used to show that observed reductions in the Arctic surface albedo in recent decades are largely linked to the decrease in Arctic snow cover fraction. The reduced snow cover fraction, driven by surface warming and declining snowfall, explains 70% of the observed reduction in the Arctic surface albedo. While absorbing aerosol (soot) falling on snow and ice can also reduce the surface albedo, the amount of soot in snow has actually been decreasing in recent decades, so soot deposition does not appear to explain the decreasing trend in snow cover and surface albedo.
