Dipole Pattern of Meridional Atmospheric Internal Energy Transport Across the Arctic Gate

High-latitude atmospheric meridional energy transport plays a fundamental role in the Arctic climate system. However, despite numerous studies, there are no established clear regional features of the atmospheric energy transport components from a large-scale perspective. This study aims at investigating the internal energy and its instantaneous sensible and latent heat transports in the troposphere through the Arctic gate at 70°N using the high-resolution climate reanalysis ERA5. We have done a regional analysis of the time series of heat fluxes across the zonal section and found by decomposing them into the empirical orthogonal functions that they have opposing features for the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. In particular, the sensible heat transport dominates in the Western Hemisphere, whereas the latent heat transport dominates in the Eastern Hemisphere. Moreover, we detected the existence of an anti-phase dipole pattern for each of these components in the entire troposphere, which is robust because it was retained during both the climate cooling in 1950–1978 and warming in 1979–2019. The hemispheric net fluxes indicate that the Arctic gains internal energy mostly due to the latent heat transport.