Detailed long-term hydrometeorological hindcast for Russian Arctic based on regional nonhydrostatic atmospheric model COSMO-CLM ver. 5.05 for 1980–2016 with ~12 km grid size used to estimate climatological trends of extreme wind speed. This hindcast shared online partially on the figshare service [1] and includes about a hundred hydrometeorological variables at both surface and 50 model levels with 1 hour output step covering the North Atlantic and Russian Arctic [2].

In this study, we used the 145 weather stations 10 m wind speed data covering Russian Arctic, Scandinavia and Arctic islands inside the hindcast domain. Trends in mean, 0.95, 0.99, 0.999 quantiles wind speed values, and occurrence of wind speed above 20, 25 and 33 m/s were calculated for all stations and corresponding nearest model grids. Statistical significance of all trends was estimated according to the Student’s t-test on 95% level.

Mean wind speed have shown most significant positive trends over northern parts of Barents and Kara seas corresponding to areas with the largest rate of ice-freeing during the last decades. At the same time, rest part of the Barents Sea and Atlantic sector shown generally negative trends. Wind speed over continents do not show any large areas of significant trends except for decrease in Taymyr peninsula.

Extreme wind speed trends according to its occurrence over 20 m/s indicated significant changes: increase over northern Barents and Kara Sea, southern Barents Sea, western Kara Sea, eastern Svalbard, White Sea Throat and subpolar region; decrease over Northern Atlantic, northern island of Novaya Zemlya, Severnaya Zemlya, Tiksi coastline and Taymyr peninsula.

References:

1. Data from the COSMO-CLM Russian Arctic Hindcast archive, figshare repository https://figshare.com/collections/Arctic_COSMO-CLM_reanalysis_all_years/5186714; https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5186714

2. Platonov V., Varentsov M. Introducing a New Detailed Long-Term COSMO-CLM Hindcast for the Russian Arctic and the First Results of Its Evaluation. 2021 Atmos. 12(3) 350 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/atmos12030350