Trends and variations in Arctic climate system

Prominent changes of the Arctic atmosphere‐ice‐ocean system observed in recent years have sparked intense discussions as to whether these changes represent episodic events or long‐term shifts in the Arctic environment. In the past, the lack of long‐term observations in the Arctic made it difficult to explore this issue. Although the length of available instrumental records is often too short to give a quantitative, statistical description of processes at multi‐decadal time scales, these Arctic records, which are similar in length to the global records, provide insight into long‐term variations of the Arctic climate system and suggest that high‐latitude climate feedbacks merit further study.