Corridor-scale sea-ice navigability and its interannual volatility: a multi-model assessment of the Arctic Europe–Pacific route

Rong Wang, Jiabiao Li, Ni Feng, Yuyang Liang, Xin Zhou, Jian Ren, Zhixiong Yao

Climate warming has brought encouraging prospects for Arctic shipping, with many studies projecting longer navigable seasons and expanded route availability as sea ice declines. Yet most assessments still focus on the lengthening of open-water duration, that is, mean accessibility, while giving less systematic attention to interannual volatility, a factor that fundamentally shapes commercial viability, insurance pricing, and long-term infrastructure investment. This is not simply an empirical omission but an integration gap: existing navigability assessments often operationalize accessibility through mean or threshold-based metrics, without treating year-to-year predictability as a distinct, governance-relevant dimension. Here we develop a corridor-scale, threshold-oriented framework that jointly evaluates navigability and its volatility, and we position this framework as a diagnostic instrument that helps translate climate variability into information usable for Arctic maritime governance. Focusing on an analysis corridor (30°E–170°W, 66–82°N) associated with Arctic Europe–Pacific connectivity, we analyze monthly sea-ice concentration from a five-model CMIP6 ensemble (MPI-ESM1-2-LR, ACCESS-CM2, CanESM5, MIROC6, and NorESM2-LM) under SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5. Navigability is defined as months in which corridor-mean sea-ice concentration falls below 15%, and volatility is quantified as the 10-year centered rolling standard deviation of the annual open-water window; model biases are assessed against C3S satellite observations. Across both scenarios and consistently across models, the open-water window lengthens from the 2030s to the 2050s, increasing in the ensemble mean from about 2.6–2.9 to about 3.5–3.7 months yr - ¹. Volatility, however, does not decline in proportion, and its temporal structure is strongly scenario-dependent: under SSP5-8.5 it peaks in the first half of the century and then declines, whereas under SSP2-4.5 it remains persistently elevated through mid-century. The near-term 2035 planning window is nearly indistinguishable between scenarios, a result robust across SIC thresholds of 10–30%. In addition, corridor-mean navigability overestimates route-level navigability by 23–41%, with the Laptev Sea identified as the principal bottleneck. The framework provides a reproducible, volatility-aware basis for strategic risk stratification and contingency planning, distinguishing routes that are becoming more accessible from those becoming more predictable.