Evaluating the effectiveness of artificial sea ice albedo enhancement in the Beaufort Gyre in restoring multi-year Arctic sea ice and Arctic regional climate.

The multi-year sea ice pack in the Arctic is on a steady decline and stringent emission reduction measures may not be efficient in restoring the sea ice or slowing down its loss without additional mitigation efforts. Artificial sea ice albedo enhancement technology (Field et al, 2018). Using hollow glass micro-spheres have been proposed and ongoing modeling studies of localized application of this technology in strategic regions of the Fram Strait and Beaufort Gyre are reported in recent literature (Ivanova et al, 2020, 2021, 2022). We model and simulate the sea ice albedo perturbation in the Beaufort Gyre using the NCAR's fully coupled climate model CESM2.0. The modeling study carried integration for 2000-2050 period of two 10-member ensembles of climate model simulations for: 1) Control reference case 2) Beaufort Gyre albedo perturbation case. These climate simulations are transient with evolving GHG forcing from: observed (historical) data sets from 2000 to 2015 and future climate scenario Shared Socioeconomic Pathways SSP2-4.5 from 2015-2050. Here we present our analysis of how perturbing the albedo of the sea ice in the core of the Beaufort Gyre will impact the sea ice distribution basin-wide and particularly what the effect on the multi-year (MY) ice buildup would be. Our hypothesis is that brightening the sea ice in the BG core will thicken the sea ice there and consequently the thicker ice will drift and spread basin wide by the Beaufort Gyre circulation. We will also evaluate the efficacy of the albedo enhancement in the Beaufort Gyre region and compare it to earlier simulations of Arctic-wide and Fram Strait targeted application.