Impact of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation on ocean heat storage and transient climate change

By Y. Kostov, K. Armour, John Marshall. 2014

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose here that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) plays an important role in setting the effective heat capacity of the World Ocean and thus impacts the pace of transient climate change. The depth and strength of AMOC are shown to be strongly correlated with the depth of heat storage across a suite of state‐of‐the‐art general circulation models (GCMs). In those models with a deeper and stronger AMOC, a smaller portion of the heat anomaly remains in the ocean mixed layer, and consequently, the surface temperature response is delayed. Representations of AMOC differ vastly across the GCMs, providing a major source of intermodel spread in the sea surface temperature (SST) response. A two‐layer model fit to the GCMs is used to demonstrate that the intermodel spread in SSTs due to variations in the ocean's effective heat capacity is significant but smaller than the spread due to climate feedbacks.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52890e0475f72c691eaec10343794fe84322d56d

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Oceanography

Citations in the corpus

CMIP6 Models Predict Significant 21st Century Decline of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (2020, background): “The AMOC is also a significant driver of carbon (e.g., Carlson et al., 2010; Fontela et al., 2016) and heat (e.g., Häkkinen et al., 2015; Kostov et al., 2014) sequestration in the subsurface ocean.”
Observations, inferences, and mechanisms of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation: A review (2016, background): “For example, the maximum of the mean AMOC in CMIP5 models occurs at latitudes between 20∘ and 60∘N and ranges in strength between 13 and 31 Sv [Zhang and Wang, 2013; Kostov et al., 2014].”
The ocean’s role in the transient response of climate to abrupt greenhouse gas forcing (2015, methodology): “These curves can be rather readily fit by analytical Green’s functions obtained from a two-layer model (see, e.g., Geoffroy et al. 2013a, b; Kostov et al. 2014).”