Impact of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation on ocean heat storage and transient climate change
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Author(s)
Kostov, Yavor Krasimirov
Armour, Kyle
Marshall, John C
Date Issued
March 2014
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Citation
Kostov, Yavor, Kyle C. Armour, and John Marshall. “Impact of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation on Ocean Heat Storage and Transient Climate Change.” Geophysical Research Letters 41, no. 6 (March 17, 2014): 2108–2116. © 2014 American Geophysical Union
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/2013gl058998
