| While perhaps the most obvious, ice retreat is just one aspect of a changing Arctic system. The Arctic Ocean is also undergoing unprecedented modifications, that mostly affect its heat and freshwater budgets. As the signal of Arctic change is expected to have its major climatic impact by reaching south the subarctic seas, on either side of Greenland, to modulate the Atlantic thermohaline circulation, the objective of this thesis is to investigate the variability of the exports of volume, heat, freshwater and sea-ice from the Arctic Ocean to the North Atlantic. First, a realistic simulation from 1958 to 2002 run with a global ocean/sea-ice model is used to investigate some aspects of the variability of the Arctic freshwater budget, trying to understand... |
