The modern and glacial overturning circulation in the Atlantic ocean in PMIP coupled model simulations

By S. Weber, S. Drijfhout, A. Abe‐Ouchi, Michel Crucifix, M. Eby, A. Ganopolski, Shingo Murakami, B. Otto‐Bliesner, W. Richard Peltier. 2006

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study analyses the response of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) to LGM forcings and boundary conditions in nine PMIP coupled model simulations, including both GCMs and Earth system Models of Intermediate Complexity. Model results differ widely. The AMOC slows down considerably (by 20–40%) during the LGM as compared to the modern climate in four models, there is a slight reduction in one model and four models show a substantial increase in AMOC strength (by 10–40%). It is found that a major controlling factor for the AMOC response is the density contrast between Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) and North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) at their source regions. Changes in the density contrast are determined by the opposing effects of changes in temperature and salinity, with more saline AABW as compared to NADW consistently found in all models and less cooling of AABW in all models but one. In only two models is the AMOC response during the LGM directly related to the response in net evaporation over the Atlantic basin. Most models show large changes in the ocean freshwater transports into the basin, but this does not seem to affect the AMOC response. Finally, there is some dependence on the accuracy of the control state.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0b11f8e1acbd7930f0dd82e09a5d16560c21134

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Citations in the corpus

Northern hemisphere storm tracks during the last glacial maximum in the PMIP2 ocean-atmosphere coupled models: energetic study, seasonal cycle, precipitation (2009, background): “case (Lynch-Stieglitz et al. 2007; Weber et al. 2007).”
Atmospheric lifetime of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (2009, background): “Model intercomparisons have proven extremely useful in climate dynamics (such as the AR4 climate forecast simulations) and paleoclimate modeling (PMIP), (Weber et al. 2007), and this project takes as its template the intercomparison ocean carbon and nutrient cycling models called OCMIP (Orr 1999).”
The stability of the MOC as diagnosed from model projections for pre-industrial, present and future climates (2011, methodology): “Weber et al. (2007) also shows the PIC budget for HadCM3 and MIROC in their Fig.”
A systematic study of the impact of freshwater pulses with respect to different geographical locations (2010, background): “It is also consistent with previous studies involving an earlier version of the same model ( Weber et al. 2007 ).”