The Arctic has become a hot spot of climate change, but the nonlinear interactions between regional and global scales in the coupled climate system responsible for Arctic amplification are not well understood and insufficiently described in climate models. Here, we compare reanalysis data with model simulations for low and high Arctic sea ice conditions to identify model biases with respect to atmospheric Arctic–mid-latitude linkages. We show that an appropriate description of Arctic sea ice forcing is able to reproduce the observed winter cooling in mid-latitudes as result of improved tropospheric-stratospheric planetary wave propagation triggering a negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation in late winter.