Multi-drivers for Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation variability in an ensemble of historical ocean reanalyses

The North Atlantic Ocean has a crucial role in the regional and global climate, with significant socio-economic impacts related to droughts, hurricanes and changes in the weather pattern. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is the main component of ocean heat transport to the North Atlantic as part of the Earth’s major circulation system. The AMOC is considered a tipping element of the planet’s climate, and abrupt and strong changes in this global-scale circulation could lead to shifts in European and North American climates and warming in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Hence, it is critical to better comprehend the drivers influencing the AMOC state and its variability.  

The direct connection between the AMOC and the deep-water formation is being challenged by recent studies, suggesting this relationship cannot explain alone the broad spectrum of AMOC variations. Moreover, the Gulf Stream is responsible for a substantial part of meridional heat transport and is considered part of the AMOC system in the North Atlantic. Recent studies show the latitudinal displacement of the current could affect the AMOC variability. Furthermore, the advection at intermediate level (800-1200m) of the Mediterranean outflow is suggested to be a possible key contributor to the strength and variability of the AMOC, although large uncertainty remains concerning the pathway of these waters into the North Atlantic and its contribution in the precondition phase of the deep-water formation in the Labrador and Greenland Island Norwegian sea. Understanding the influence of each of these drivers is vital.  

The scarcity of direct observational records in space and time poses an important challenge to disentangle the AMOC drivers and their variability in the North Atlantic, especially since the North Atlantic Ocean presents unusual variability at decadal and multi-decadal scales. Previous studies have used either short observation records, low-resolution numerical models or indirect (proxy) observations to investigate the AMOC. Long-term and three-dimensional datasets are needed to understand the ocean’s changes at large space and time scales. Therefore, the aim of our work is to investigate the multi-drivers of the AMOC variability using a large ensemble (32 members) of global historical ocean reanalyses covering the period from 1961 to 2022. We focus on the deep-water formation, Gulf Stream shift and Mediterranean Outflow Water (MOW) as multi-drivers of the AMOC in the North Atlantic. It is the first time that a large ensemble of 60-year observation-based ocean dataset is used to investigate multiple drivers responsible for changes in the AMOC and the North Atlantic’s decadal climate. We calculated indexes for each driver and used multivariate regression methods (e.g. LASSO) to explore the role of multi-drivers. Preliminary results show that at the interannual time scale, the variability of the Gulf Stream is well correlated with the AMOC variability and at a longer time scale, the deep-water formation and Mediterranean outflow have a close correlation with the AMOC transport. Further investigation is ongoing to quantify the relative contribution from these drivers to the AMOC variability at different time scales.