Recent observational advances from the South Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (SAMOC) initiative

• Main Author: Renellys Perez
• Format: Lecture
• Language: English
• Published: Zenodo 2023
• Subjects: AMOC; SAMOC; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8071210

The South Atlantic is a key gateway for water mass and property exchanges between the Atlantic and other basins, and is thus a crucial place to measure changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The international South Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (SAMOC) initiative has made numerous advances in observing thevariability of heat, fresh-water, and volume (mass) transports by the AMOC in the South Atlantic, as well as studying their connection to interocean exchanges,over the past fifteen years. Moored arrays established in the tropical and subtropical South Atlantic have been transformative for AMOC science, providing continuous daily observations of AMOC, as well as interior and abyssal transport pathways. Recent hydrographic sections provide exciting results about the interplay between eddies and volume, heat, and fresh-water transports by AMOC. Multi-decadal satellite-based products and blended satellite-in situ products provide new information about the connectivity between AMOC variations in the South and North Atlantic, and provide opportunities for cross-validation of mooring-based AMOC observations. SAMOC observations are being used to validate and inform improvements to state-of-the-art numerical models, so that models can improve and provide better insights on the dynamical mechanisms driving AMOC variations in the South Atlantic. As SAMOC data records become longer and new observations coming online, we anticipate that their use by the community will increase spurring new research advancements. During this presentation, we will summarize key findings from ongoing SAMOC observing efforts, and describe expansions to the SAMOC observing system, and discuss some ways in which the observing system might evolve in the future.