Lee de Mora
Marine Ecosystem Modeller, Plymouth Marine Laboratory
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is hugely important to the global climate, influencing heat transport, carbon drawdown and deep water formation. Despite its importance, the future of the AMOC is not yet fully understood.
On one hand, the climate models from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) universally projected a weakening in the AMOC as temperatures increase, but they did not project a full collapse to zero at any warming level. On the other hand, some experiments have suggested that the AMOC is too stable in those CMIP-style models, and the real AMOC may be more prone to collapse.
This paper from Baker et al. identifies AMOC-stabilizing mechanisms in the Southern Ocean and Pacific Ocean that may explain why the CMIP6 models have a stable AMOC.