Pacific Water (PW) enters the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait and brings in heat, fresh water, and nutrients from the northern Bering Sea. The circulation of PW in the central Arctic Ocean is only partially understood due to the lack of observations. In this paper, pathways of PW are investigated using simulations with six state‐of‐the art regional and global Ocean General Circulation Models (OGCMs). In the simulations, PW is tracked by a passive tracer, released in Bering Strait. Simulated PW spreads from the Bering Strait region in three major branches. One of them starts in the Barrow Canyon, bringing PW along the continental slope of Alaska into the Canadian Straits and then into Baffin Bay. The second begins in the vicinity of the Herald Canyon and transports PW along the continental slope of the East Siberian Sea into the Transpolar Drift, and then through Fram Strait and the Greenland Sea. The third branch begins near the Herald Shoal and the central Chukchi shelf and brings PW into the Beaufort Gyre. In the models, the wind, acting via Ekman pumping, drives the seasonal and interannual variability of PW in the Canadian Basin of the Arctic Ocean. The wind affects the simulated PW pathways by changing the vertical shear of the relative vorticity of the ocean flow in the Canada Basin.

The fast development of the offshore energy industry becomes an essential component of resilient economies in most of the countries around the North Sea, addressing an increasing demand for cost-efficient and environmentally safe energy sources. Offshore wind farms are planned to be installed further away from the coasts to ensure stronger and more stable wind resources in this region. Oil and gas extraction infrastructures are also planned to move into deeper areas of the continental shelf and continental shelf slopes to explore new fields. These deeper areas of the ocean are characterised by harsh environmental conditions: stronger winds, larger waves and strong shelf slope currents, inducing considerably larger loads on offshore structures. This study brings together operational physical oceanography and the mathematics of fluid-structure interactions to estimate the likelihood of extreme environmental loads on offshore structures in the North Sea. We use the state-of-the-art Met Office high resolution ocean forecasting system, which provides high-frequency data on ocean and tidal currents, wave heights and periods and winds at a ~7 km horizontal resolution grid, spanning the North–West European Shelf. The Morison equation framework is used to calculate environmental loads on various types of offshore structures that are typically employed by the offshore industries in the North Sea. We use hourly data for a 2-year period to analyse the spatio-temporal variability of mean and extreme hydrodynamic loads and derive the relative contributions of currents, waves and winds in the region. The results indicate that waves dominate extreme hydrodynamic forces on the shallow shelf, whereas the current contribution is important at the shelf break and in the English Channel.

We present analysis of Arctic sea ice and ocean dynamics in the ensemble of the UK Earth System Model (UK ESM1) simulations completed under the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) protocol. The focus of the investigation is on the future changes in the Arctic sea ice and oceanic connections and on the impact of the nutrient advection on the Arctic marine biogeochemistry and ecosystems. Changes in the balance of the oceanic inflows from the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans are found to have a first order effect on the watermasses and nutrients balances in the central Arctic Ocean. The simulations show that the total primary production in the Arctic Ocean is increased by 100% in the 2090s as compared to the present climate. This is caused by higher nutrients availability in the Atlantic inflowing waters and prolonged ice- free season. The faster connections through the Arctic and milder oceanic environment allows species to survive through the winter and from the second half of the century the Arctic Ocean could become a key oceanic gateway connecting the global oceans. The study is supported from the project APEAR (NE/R012865/1) NERC-BMBF and from the NERC ACSIS Programme (NE/N018044/1).