The current contribution presents wintertime climatology from 2012 to 2020 of mixed-phase clouds and their radiative effects when coupled to the sea ice states. Measurements from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) at the North Slope Alaska (NSA) site in Utqiagvik, Alaska are being analyzed.

Classification of cloud hydrometeors in the liquid, ice or mixed-phase states was primary determined by the Cloudnet algorithm, developed by the Finish Meteorological Institute, and applied to a set of ground-based remote sensing instruments from NSA . To evaluate the influence by sea ice, which plays an important role on the Arctic surface-atmosphere interaction, the statistics are separated into cases when clouds are coupled or decoupled to specific sea ice conditions, like presence of leads or polynyas in the vicinity of NSA .

We found that clouds coupled to sea ice with presence of leads have shown distinguished features like the increase of total liquid content, lower cloud base heights and less ice content when compared to decoupled cases. Nevertheless, these results rely on Cloudnet accurately detecting cloud droplets within mixed-phase clouds.

Arctic cloud radiative effects (CRE) have already been studied from short expeditions like the SHEBA campaign (Shupe et al., 2004) and middle-term ground observations in Barrow (Shupe et al., 2015) and Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard (Ebell et al., 2020). We extend similar CRE studies for 8 years during wintertime, where longwave up- and down-welling flux measurements from NSA are used to estimate surface net fuxes and other cloud radiative features for cases when clouds are coupled or decoupled to sea ice conditions and their sensitivity to different gradients of air-surface temperature when leads or polynyas are present.