Reeburgh Lecture: Susan Lozier

Title: The meridional overturning circulation in the North Atlantic: new results and new questions

Abstract: Since the concern of abrupt climate change brought about by the diminishment of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) was raised twenty years ago, the oceanographic community has undertaken a focused effort to understand AMOC variability and the mechanisms that govern it on interannual to decadal time scales. Over the past twenty years, it has also become increasingly evident that an understanding of AMOC’s potential impact on anthropogenic carbon uptake and storage in the North Atlantic is needed for improved climate predictions. In response to these concerns, several trans-basin arrays have been deployed to continuously measure the AMOC, and dozens of modeling studies have focused on elucidating the character and mechanisms of its variability.  The collective input from these efforts has transformed our current understanding of this global circulation feature and its impact on climate. In this talk, I will review those efforts in the North Atlantic and discuss our current understanding of the AMOC in that basin.