Unprecedented summertime Arctic sea ice loss is opening the region to increased oil and gas extraction activities and ship traffic. Arctic aerosol emissions are expected to increase with increasing anthropogenic activities and production of sea spray aerosol. Given the complexity and evolving nature of atmospheric particles, as well as the challenges associated with Arctic measurements, significant uncertainties remain in our understanding of particle sources, evolution, and impacts in the Arctic.

The ongoing shrinkage of the Arctic sea ice cover is likely linked to the global temperature rise, the amplified warming in the Arctic, and possibly weather anomalies in the mid-latitudes. By applying a novel statistical method in climate science, the Independent Component Analysis (ICA), to global atmospheric energy anomalies in winters from 1980 to 2015, we show the link between the sea ice melting in the Arctic and the combination of only three atmospheric oscillation patterns approximating observed spatial variations of near-surface temperature trends in winter.

The Arctic region is rapidly gaining interest and support for scientific studies to help understand and characterize the processes, sources, and chemical composition of the Arctic environment. In order to understand the Arctic climate system and the changes that are occurring, it is imperative to know the behavior and impact of atmospheric constituents. As a secondary pollutant which impacts the oxidation capacity and radiative forcing of the atmosphere, ozone is an imperative species to characterize.

As we examine the world after the Paris Agreement, lessons from recent environmental trends and modelling of the impacts on the Arctic cryosphere under different greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration show, with increasing confidence, that stabilizing global temperatures near 2° C will slow but not halt large changes in the Arctic in the foreseeable future (decades).

Arctic Amplification is a phenomenon linked to complicated, non-linear processes and feedback mechanisms between surface and atmosphere in the Arctic regions. Aerosols are one of the largest sources of uncertainty for those processes and feedbacks due to spatial/temporal coverage and quality of the available observations. Aerosol optical properties, especially Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT), over the Arctic are currently sparsely provided by ground-based measurements or active remote sensing observations with very limited spatial coverage for a relative short time period.

Aerosol and ozone pollution in the Arctic predominantly originates from long-range pollution transport of anthropogenic and biomass burning emissions from the midlatitudes. However, local emission sources such as shipping and oil and gas extraction could already have an important local or regional influence on atmospheric composition and on the Arctic energy budget, even though this influence is not well characterized. In this work, we perform quasi-hemispheric simulations of aerosols and ozone in the Arctic with the WRF-Chem model.

Arctic is warming rapidly in past few decades. Recent studies have suggested large increase of BVOC emissions in this region as a result of warming and vegetation greening. Here we use aircraft measurements, satellite observations of formaldehyde and formic acid, interpreted with a global chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem), to better quantify the decadal trend of BVOC emissions in this region. A large uncertainty of this work lies in the model representation of monoterpene oxidation.

The Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) in Eureka, Nunavut (80.05N, 86.42W) on Ellesmere Island houses a ground-based Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer that measures solar-absorption spectra during clear-sky daylight hours. Trace gas abundances are retrieved from the measured spectra by the use of the SFIT4 retrieval algorithm as part of the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC).

Black carbon aerosols have substantial impacts on air quality and climate from regional to global scales. In the present study we implemented a tag-tracer scheme of black carbon (BC) and carbon monoxide (CO) into a global chemistry-transport model GEOS-Chem, and examined long-range transport of BC and CO from various sources to the Arctic and quantified the source contributions.

To understand the radiative effects of aerosols on climate of Polar Regions we require an in depth knowledge of aerosol optical and chemical properties. In this study we have analyzed the aerosol properties such as aerosol optical depth at 500 nm (AOD) and Angstrom exponent (440-870 nm) (AE) to investigate the content, type and seasonality of aerosols over the Arctic location of Oliktok Point (Alaska). For this purpose we have used all the available data from Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) from September 2013 to October 2016.