Pulling the Meridional Overturning Circulation From the South DESC0005100

• Main Authors: Cessi, Paola, Wolfe, Christopher L.
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: 71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS; GENERAL PHYSICS; 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; Antarctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1227203; https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1227203; https://doi.org/10.2172/1227203

This project concerned the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), its stability, variability and sensitivity to atmospheric forcing, both mechanical (wind-stress) and thermodynamical (heat and freshwater surface fluxes). The focus of the study is the interhemispheric cell in the largely adiabatic regime, where the flow is characterized by a descending branch in the high latitudes of the North Atlantic and the upwelling branch in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) region of the Southern Ocean. These two end points are connected by shared isopycnals along which the flow takes place. The approach is to systematically study the amplitude and frequency of the AMOC’s response to localized buoyancy with an ocean-only model in both coarse and high-resolution configurations, analyzed with innovative diagnostics, focused on the “residual overturning circulation” (ROC), which is the proper measure of the transport of heat and other tracers.