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Abstract The wintertime (December–February) 1990–2016 Arctic surface air temperature (SAT) trend is examined using self-organizing maps (SOMs). The high-dimensional SAT dataset is reduced into nine representative SOM patterns, with each pattern exhibiting a decorrelation time scale of about 10 days and having about 85% of its variance coming from intraseasonal time scales. The trend in the frequency of occurrence of each SOM pattern is used to estimate the interdecadal Arctic winter warming trend associated with the SOM patterns. It is found that trends in the SOM patterns explain about one-half of the SAT trend in the Barents and Kara Seas, one-third of the SAT trend around Baffin Bay, and two-thirds of the SAT trend in the Chukchi Sea. A composite calculation of each term in the thermodynamic energy equation for each SOM pattern shows that the SAT anomalies grow primarily through the advection of the climatological temperature by the anomalous wind. This implies that a substantial fraction of Arctic amplification is due to horizontal temperature advection that is driven by changes in the atmospheric circulation. An analysis of the surface energy budget indicates that the skin temperature anomalies as well as the trend, although very similar to that of the SAT, are produced primarily by downward longwave radiation. 

The tropospheric response to Sudden Stratospheric Warmings (SSWs) is associated with an equatorward shift in the midlatitude jet and associated storm tracks, while Strong Polar Vortex (SPV) events elicit a contrasting response. Recent analyses of the North Atlantic jet using probability density functions of a jet latitude index have identified three preferred jet latitudes, raising the question of whether the tropospheric response to SSWs and SPVs results from a change in relative frequencies of these preferred jet regimes rather than a systematic jet shift. We explore this question using atmospheric reanalysis data from 1979 to 2018 (26 SSWs and 33 SPVs), and a 202‐years integration of the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (92 SSWs and 68 SPVs). Following SSWs, the northern jet regime becomes less common and the central and southern regimes become more common. These changes occur almost immediately following “split” vortex events, but are more delayed following “displacement” events. In contrast, the northern regime becomes more frequent and the southern regime less frequent following SPV events. Following SSWs, composites of 500‐hPa geopotential heights, surface air temperatures, and precipitation most closely resemble composites of the southern jet regime, and are generally opposite in sign to the composites of the northern jet regime. These comparisons are reversed following SPVs. Thus, one possible interpretation is that the two southernmost regimes appear to be favored following SSWs, while the southernmost regime becomes less common following SPVs.