Publication Date:
2022-10-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Little, C. M., Hu, A., Hughes, C. W., McCarthy, G. D., Piecuch, C. G., Ponte, R. M., & Thomas, M. D. The relationship between U.S. East Coast sea level and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation: a review. Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans, 124(9), (2019): 6435-6458, doi:10.1029/2019JC015152.
Description:
Scientific and societal interest in the relationship between the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and U.S. East Coast sea level has intensified over the past decade, largely due to (1) projected, and potentially ongoing, enhancement of sea level rise associated with AMOC weakening and (2) the potential for observations of U.S. East Coast sea level to inform reconstructions of North Atlantic circulation and climate. These implications have inspired a wealth of model‐ and observation‐based analyses. Here, we review this research, finding consistent support in numerical models for an antiphase relationship between AMOC strength and dynamic sea level. However, simulations exhibit substantial along‐coast and intermodel differences in the amplitude of AMOC‐associated dynamic sea level variability. Observational analyses focusing on shorter (generally less than decadal) timescales show robust relationships between some components of the North Atlantic large‐scale circulation and coastal sea level variability, but the causal relationships between different observational metrics, AMOC, and sea level are often unclear. We highlight the importance of existing and future research seeking to understand relationships between AMOC and its component currents, the role of ageostrophic processes near the coast, and the interplay of local and remote forcing. Such research will help reconcile the results of different numerical simulations with each other and with observations, inform the physical origins of covariability, and reveal the sensitivity of scaling relationships to forcing, timescale, and model representation. This information will, in turn, provide a more complete characterization of uncertainty in relevant relationships, leading to more robust reconstructions and projections.
Description:
The authors acknowledge funding support from NSF Grant OCE‐1805029 (C. M. L.) and NASA Contract NNH16CT01C (C. M. L. and R. M. P.), the Regional and Global Model Analysis (RGMA) component of the Earth and Environmental System Modeling Program of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Biological & Environmental Research Cooperative Agreement DE‐FC02‐97ER62402 (A. H.), Natural Environment Research Council NE/K012789/1 (C. W. H.), Irish Marine Institute Project A4 PBA/CC/18/01 (G. D. M.), and NSF Awards OCE‐1558966 and OCE‐1834739 (C. G. P.). The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by National Science Foundation. The authors thank the two reviewers for their comments, and CLIVAR and the U.S. AMOC Science Team for inspiration and patience. All CMIP5 data used in Figures 4-6 are available at http://pcmdi9.llnl.gov/ website; the AMOC strength fields were digitized from Chen et al. (2018, supporting information Figure S3).
Keywords:
Sea level
;
AMOC
;
United States
;
Coastal
;
Climate model
;
Review
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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