Stability and Variability of the Thermohaline Circulation in the Past and Future: a Study with a Coupled Model of Intermediate Complexity

Author(s):  
Audrey Ganopolski ◽  
Stefan Rahmstorf
1996 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit Lohmann ◽  
Rüdiger Gerdes ◽  
Deliang Chen

2004 ◽  
Vol 17 (21) ◽  
pp. 4267-4279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aixue Hu ◽  
Gerald A. Meehl ◽  
Warren M. Washington ◽  
Aiguo Dai

Abstract Changes in the thermohaline circulation (THC) due to increased CO2 are important in future climate regimes. Using a coupled climate model, the Parallel Climate Model (PCM), regional responses of the THC in the North Atlantic to increased CO2 and the underlying physical processes are studied here. The Atlantic THC shows a 20-yr cycle in the control run, qualitatively agreeing with other modeling results. Compared with the control run, the simulated maximum of the Atlantic THC weakens by about 5 Sv (1 Sv ≡ 106 m3 s−1) or 14% in an ensemble of transient experiments with a 1% CO2 increase per year at the time of CO2 doubling. The weakening of the THC is accompanied by reduced poleward heat transport in the midlatitude North Atlantic. Analyses show that oceanic deep convective activity strengthens significantly in the Greenland–Iceland–Norway (GIN) Seas owing to a saltier (denser) upper ocean, but weakens in the Labrador Sea due to a fresher (lighter) upper ocean and in the south of the Denmark Strait region (SDSR) because of surface warming. The saltiness of the GIN Seas are mainly caused by an increased salty North Atlantic inflow, and reduced sea ice volume fluxes from the Arctic into this region. The warmer SDSR is induced by a reduced heat loss to the atmosphere, and a reduced sea ice flux into this region, resulting in less heat being used to melt ice. Thus, sea ice–related salinity effects appear to be more important in the GIN Seas, but sea ice–melt-related thermal effects seem to be more important in the SDSR region. On the other hand, the fresher Labrador Sea is mainly attributed to increased precipitation. These regional changes produce the overall weakening of the THC in the Labrador Sea and SDSR, and more vigorous ocean overturning in the GIN Seas. The northward heat transport south of 60°N is reduced with increased CO2, but increased north of 60°N due to the increased flow of North Atlantic water across this latitude.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anni Zhao ◽  
Chris Brierley

<p>Experiment outputs are now available from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project’s 6<sup>th</sup> phase (CMIP6) and the past climate experiments defined in the Model Intercomparison Project’s 4<sup>th</sup> phase (PMIP4). All of this output is freely available from the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). Yet there are overheads in analysing this resource that may prove complicated or prohibitive. Here we document the steps taken by ourselves to produce ensemble analyses covering past and future simulations. We outline the strategy used to curate, adjust the monthly calendar aggregation and process the information downloaded from the ESGF. The results of these steps were used to perform analysis for several of the initial publications arising from PMIP4. We provide post-processed fields for each simulation, such as climatologies and common measures of variability. Example scripts used to visualise and analyse these fields is provided for several important case studies.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (17) ◽  
pp. 6803-6819 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo-Joung Park ◽  
Yeon-Hee Kim ◽  
Seung-Ki Min ◽  
Eun-Pa Lim

Observed long-term variations in summer season timing and length in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) continents and their subregions were analyzed using temperature-based indices. The climatological mean showed coastal–inland contrast; summer starts and ends earlier inland than in coastal areas because of differences in heat capacity. Observations for the past 60 years (1953–2012) show lengthening of the summer season with earlier summer onset and delayed summer withdrawal across the NH. The summer onset advance contributed more to the observed increase in summer season length in many regions than the delay of summer withdrawal. To understand anthropogenic and natural contributions to the observed change, summer season trends from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) multimodel simulations forced with the observed external forcings [anthropogenic plus natural forcing (ALL), natural forcing only (NAT), and greenhouse gas forcing only (GHG)] were analyzed. ALL and GHG simulations were found to reproduce the overall observed global and regional lengthening trends, but NAT had negligible trends, which implies that increased greenhouse gases were the main cause of the observed changes. However, ALL runs tend to underestimate the observed trend of summer onset and overestimate that of withdrawal, the causes of which remain to be determined. Possible contributions of multidecadal variabilities, such as Pacific decadal oscillation and Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, to the observed regional trends in summer season length were also assessed. The results suggest that multidecadal variability can explain a moderate portion (about ±10%) of the observed trends in summer season length, mainly over the high latitudes.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (05) ◽  
pp. 1539-1549 ◽  
Author(s):  
XIUPING HAN ◽  
JUN-AN LU ◽  
XIAOQUN WU

In the past years, impulsive control for a single system and impulsive synchronization between two systems have been extensively studied. However, investigation on impulsive control and synchronization of complex networks has just started. In these studies, a network is continuously coupled, and then is synchronized by using impulsive control strategy. In this paper, a new and different coupled model is proposed, where the systems are coupled only at discrete instants through impulsive connections. Several criteria for synchronizing such kind of impulsively coupled complex dynamical systems are established. Two examples are also worked through for illustrating the main results.


2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (21) ◽  
pp. 5637-5651 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willem P. Sijp ◽  
Michael Bates ◽  
Matthew H. England

Abstract Convective overturning arising from static instability during winter is thought to play a crucial role in the formation of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). In ocean general circulation models (OGCMs), a strong reduction in convective penetration depth arises when horizontal diffusion (HD) is replaced by Gent and McWilliams (GM) mixing to model the effect of mesoscale eddies on tracer advection. In areas of sinking, the role of vertical tracer transport due to convection is largely replaced by the vertical component of isopycnal diffusion along sloping isopycnals. Here, the effect of this change in tracer transport physics on the stability of NADW formation under freshwater (FW) perturbations of the North Atlantic (NA) in a coupled model is examined. It is found that there is a significantly increased stability of NADW to FW input when GM is used in spite of GM experiments exhibiting consistently weaker NADW formation rates in unperturbed steady states. It is also found that there is a significant increase in NADW stability upon the introduction of isopycnal diffusion in the absence of GM. This indicates that isopycnal diffusion of tracer rather than isopycnal thickness diffusion is responsible for the increased NADW stability observed in the GM run. This result is robust with respect to the choice of isopycnal diffusion coefficient. Also, the NADW behavior in the isopycnal run, which includes a fixed background horizontal diffusivity, demonstrates that HD is not responsible in itself for reducing NADW stability when simple horizontal diffusion is used. Our results suggest that care should be taken when interpreting the results of coarse grid models with regard to NADW sensitivity to FW anomalies, regardless of the choice of mixing scheme.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Kadow ◽  
David Hall ◽  
Uwe Ulbrich

<p>Nowadays climate change research relies on climate information of the past. Historic climate records of temperature observations form global gridded datasets like HadCRUT4, which is investigated e.g. in the IPCC reports. However, record combining data-sets are sparse in the past. Even today they contain missing values. Here we show that machine learning technology can be applied to refill these missing climate values in observational datasets. We found that the technology of image inpainting using partial convolutions in a CUDA accelerated deep neural network can be trained by large Earth system model experiments from NOAA reanalysis (20CR) and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5). The derived deep neural networks are capable to independently refill added missing values of these experiments. The analysis shows a very high degree of reconstruction even in the cross-reconstruction of the trained networks on the other dataset. The network reconstruction reaches a better evaluation than other typical methods in climate science. In the end we will show the new reconstructed observational dataset HadCRUT4 and discuss further investigations.</p>


2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1736-1748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fangxing Fan ◽  
Michael E. Mann ◽  
Caspar M. Ammann

Abstract The Asian summer monsoon (ASM) and its variability were investigated over the past millennium through the analysis of a long-term simulation of the NCAR Climate System Model, version 1.4 (CSM 1.4) coupled model driven with estimated natural and anthropogenic radiative forcing during the period 850–1999. Analysis of the simulation results indicates that certain previously proposed mechanisms, such as warmer large-scale temperatures favoring a stronger monsoon through their effect on Eurasian snow cover, appear inconsistent with the mechanisms active in the simulation. Forced changes in tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures play an apparent role in the long-term changes in the ASM. Analyses of the simulation results suggest that the direct radiative effect of solar forcing variations on the ASM is quite weak and that dynamical responses may be far more important. Volcanic radiative forcing leads to a clearly detectable short-term reduction in the strength of the ASM. Comparisons with long-term proxy reconstructions of the ASM are attempted but are limited by the divergent behavior among different reconstructions as well as the limitations in the model’s coupled dynamics.


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