<jats:title>ABSTRACT</jats:title><jats:p>The wintertime central Arctic atmosphere comprises a radiatively clear and a radiatively opaque state, which are linked to synoptic forcing and mixed‐phase clouds. Weather and climate models often lack process representations surrounding these states, but prior work mostly treated the problem as an aggregate of synoptic conditions, resulting in partially overlapping biases. Here, we disaggregate the Arctic states and confront ERA5 reanalysis with observations from the MOSAiC campaign over the central Arctic sea ice during winter 2019/2020. Low‐level winds and liquid water path (LWP) are combined to derive different synoptic classes. Results show that the clear state is primarily formed by weak/moderate winds and the absence of liquid‐bearing clouds, while strong winds and enhanced LWP primarily form the radiatively opaque state. ERA5 struggles to reproduce these basic statistics, shows too weak sensitivity of thermal radiation to synoptic forcing, and overestimates thermal radiation for similar LWP amounts. The latter is caused by a warm bias, which has a pronounced inversion structure and is largest in clear and calm conditions. Under strong synoptic forcing, the warm bias is constant with height and discrepancies in mixed‐phase cloud altitude appear. Separating synoptic conditions is regarded as useful for process‐oriented evaluation of the Arctic troposphere in models.</jats:p>