ClimaTea Journal Club: 'Exceptional twentieth-century slowdown in Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation'

Date: 

Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Location: 

HUCE Seminar Room

This week GS Chris Horvat will be leading discussion on Rahmstorf et al (2015), 'Exceptional twentieth-century slowdown in Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation.' Chris says the following about the the upcoming ClimaTea:

This week we will continue our discussion of climate instability, centered around the recent Nature article by Rahmstorf et. al, "exceptional twentieth-century slowdown in Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation". The authors attribute a region of "conspicuous" cooling relative to the background warming signal in the northern Atlantic to a decreasing atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) index developed from SST observations.

Going (much) further, the authors use a SST reconstruction to develop the AMOC index over the previous millennium, and suggest that there was a period of weakening of the AMOC in the time period between 1975 and 1995 that is unprecedented in the last millennium. We'll discuss how to contextualize this result, both in terms of our understanding of the AMOC and its variability as well as the recent history of claims of AMOC shutdown or weakening.

rahmstorf_et_al_2015.pdf825 KB