The ocean’s role in the transient response of climate to abrupt greenhouse gas forcing
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Author(s)
Kelley, Maxwell
Romanou, Anastasia
Campin, Jean-Michel
Scott, Jeremy
Armour, Kyle
Marshall, John C
Date Issued
September 2014
Journal
Climate Dynamics
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Citation
Marshall, John, Jeffery R. Scott, Kyle C. Armour, J.-M. Campin, Maxwell Kelley, and Anastasia Romanou. “The Ocean’s Role in the Transient Response of Climate to Abrupt Greenhouse Gas Forcing.” Climate Dynamics 44, no. 7–8 (September 4, 2014): 2287–2299.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We study the role of the ocean in setting the patterns and timescale of the transient response of the climate to anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing. A novel framework is set out which involves integration of an ocean-only model in which the anthropogenic temperature signal is forced from the surface by anomalous downwelling heat fluxes and damped at a rate controlled by a ‘climate feedback’ parameter. We observe a broad correspondence between the evolution of the anthropogenic temperature (T[subscript anthro]) in our simplified ocean-only model and that of coupled climate models perturbed by a quadrupling of CO[subscript 2]. This suggests that many of the mechanisms at work in fully coupled models are captured by our idealized ocean-only system. The framework allows us to probe the role of the ocean in delaying warming signals in the Southern Ocean and in the northern North Atlantic, and in amplifying the warming signal in the Arctic. By comparing active and passive temperature-like tracers we assess the degree to which changes in ocean circulation play a role in setting the distribution and evolution of T[subscript anthro]. The background ocean circulation strongly influences the large-scale patterns of ocean heat uptake and storage, such that T[subscript anthro] is governed by an advection/diffusion equation and weakly damped to the atmosphere at a rate set by climate feedbacks. Where warming is sufficiently small, for example in the Southern Ocean, changes in ocean circulation play a secondary role. In other regions, most noticeably in the North Atlantic, changes in ocean circulation induced by T[subscript anthro] are central in shaping the response.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Global Change Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Article is available under a Creative Commons license; see publisher's site for details.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2308-0
