Weakening Atlantic overturning circulation causes South Atlantic salinity pile-up

Chenyu Zhu and Zhengyu Liu ()
Additional contact information
Chenyu Zhu: Ocean University of China
Zhengyu Liu: Nanjing Normal University

Nature Climate Change, 2020, vol. 10, issue 11, 998-1003

Abstract: Abstract The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is an active component of the Earth’s climate system1 and its response to global warming is of critical importance to society. Climate models have shown an AMOC slowdown under anthropogenic warming since the industrial revolution2–4, but this slowdown has been difficult to detect in the short observational record5–10 because of substantial interdecadal climate variability. This has led to the indirect detection of the slowdown from longer-term fingerprints11–14 such as the subpolar North Atlantic ‘warming hole’11. However, these fingerprints, which exhibit some uncertainties15, are all local indicators of AMOC slowdown around the subpolar North Atlantic. Here we show observational and modelling evidence of a remote indicator of AMOC slowdown outside the North Atlantic. Under global warming, the weakening AMOC reduces the salinity divergence and then leads to a ‘salinity pile-up’ remotely in the South Atlantic. This evidence is consistent with the AMOC slowdown under anthropogenic warming and, furthermore, suggests that this weakening has likely occurred all the way into the South Atlantic.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0897-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:10:y:2020:i:11:d:10.1038_s41558-020-0897-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-020-0897-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().