Science Daily August 5, 2021
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, transports warm water masses from the tropics northward at the ocean surface and cold water southward at the ocean bottom. It influences weather systems worldwide. A potential collapse of this ocean current system could have severe consequences. An international team of researchers (Germany, UK) have developed a robust and general early-warning indicator for forthcoming critical transitions. Significant early-warning signals are found in eight independent AMOC indices, based on observational sea-surface temperature and salinity data from across the Atlantic Ocean basin. The findings support the assessment that the AMOC decline is not just a fluctuation or a linear response to increasing temperatures but likely means the approaching of a critical threshold beyond which the circulation system could collapse. According to the researchers the current models need to be reconciled with these observational evidence to assess how far from or how close to its critical threshold the AMOC really is…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Spatial trends and EWS in Atlantic SSTs and salinity. Credit: Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages680–688 (2021)Â