Meridional Ocean Heat Transport

Assembled from 25 blocks · 2 evidence · 29 related

1. Story
2. The rate at which the ocean carries heat across a line of latitude, measured in petawatts. At 26°N in the Atlantic the RAPID array has measured it since 2004 at roughly 1.25 PW, with a reported reduction from about 1.32 PW before 2009 to about 1.15 PW in the years after. This is the quantity that carries the popular claim about the Gulf Stream and European climate — and it is also the quantity that shows why the claim is more complicated than it sounds, because the atmosphere transports heat poleward as well, and the seasonal storage and release of heat by the ocean surface is a separate mechanism from heat carried by currents.
3. Knowledge
4. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)
5. Meridional Ocean Heat Transport
6. Connections
7. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)
8. The Physical Geography of the Sea is published
9. The Gulf Stream is found not to explain Europe's mild winters
10. Gulf Stream
11. Thermohaline Circulation
12. Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC)
13. North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW)
14. RAPID-MOCHA-WBTS Array at 26.5°N
15. Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP)
16. Meridional Ocean Heat Transport
17. The RAPID array begins continuous AMOC measurement at 26.5°N
18. OSNAP moves the engine room out of the Labrador Sea
19. IPCC AR6 assesses AMOC decline as very likely and collapse as unlikely this century
20. A statistical early-warning analysis puts an AMOC collapse mid-century
21. A physics-based early warning signal is proposed
22. Twenty-two years of continuous AMOC observation
23. Evidence
24. The RAPID array at 26.5°N gives a mean AMOC of 17.0 Sv (s.d. 2.8 Sv) for April 2004 to January 2023 and a weakening of 1.0 [0.4–1.6] Sv per decade; the trend is not expected to exceed a signal-to-noise ratio of 2 until the 2040s. Read via search summary; the paper itself could not be fetched because the publisher domain is blocked to this run.
25. The winter temperature contrast between western Europe and eastern North America is principally caused by atmospheric advection and the seasonal release of stored ocean heat, not by heat convergence from the Gulf Stream; the older claim is traced to Maury. Read via search summaries of the paper and of later commentary; not fetched.