The complexity of Arctic landscapes under climate warming means we have low confidence in which of these different processes might
dominate on a regional scale.
Not exact matches
The uncertainty is largest
on the
regional scale because the horizontal transports of energy (latent heat, sensible heat, geopotential energy)
dominate over the radiative transfer of energy.
At this point, the
regional outlook
on ice conditions indicates that the large -
scale weather patterns, which
dominated in August with cooler conditions and advection of ice into the eastern North American Arctic, can also help explain much of the observed ice distribution at the local level.
On smaller spatial
scales and smaller temporal
scales (such as ~ 10 yrs and a portion of the continental US) climatic trends can easily be
dominated by
regional effects.