Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)

Assembled from 31 blocks · 2 evidence · 54 related

1. Story
2. The Atlantic limb of the density-driven circulation: warm, salty water moving north near the surface, losing heat to the atmosphere at high latitudes, sinking, and returning south at depth as North Atlantic Deep Water. It is the best-observed overturning cell on Earth because a single mooring array has watched it continuously at one latitude for over twenty years. Across April 2004 to January 2023 the RAPID array at 26.5°N gives a mean overturning maximum of 17.0 Sv with a standard deviation of 2.8 Sv, and a weakening trend of 1.0 [0.4–1.6] Sv per decade. That trend is small against the variability, which is why the argument about whether the AMOC is declining is an argument about signal and noise as much as about physics.
3. Knowledge
4. Thermohaline Circulation
5. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)
6. Connections
7. Gulf Stream
8. Thermohaline Circulation
9. Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC)
10. North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW)
11. RAPID-MOCHA-WBTS Array at 26.5°N
12. Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP)
13. Meridional Ocean Heat Transport
14. The RAPID array begins continuous AMOC measurement at 26.5°N
15. OSNAP moves the engine room out of the Labrador Sea
16. IPCC AR6 assesses AMOC decline as very likely and collapse as unlikely this century
17. A statistical early-warning analysis puts an AMOC collapse mid-century
18. A physics-based early warning signal is proposed
19. Twenty-two years of continuous AMOC observation
20. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)
21. Coastal and Equatorial Upwelling
22. Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW)
23. Southern Ocean
24. Argo Profiling Float Array
25. Wallace Broecker
26. The great ocean conveyor is drawn
27. The Argo design array is completed
28. IPCC AR6 assesses AMOC decline as very likely and collapse as unlikely this century
29. Evidence
30. 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.
31. The AMOC will very likely decline over the twenty-first century under all SSP scenarios, with medium confidence that the decline will not involve an abrupt collapse before 2100. The assessment language is quoted from secondary reporting of the chapter; the chapter itself was not fetched.