Probabilistic projections of the Atlantic overturning

Changes in the Atlantic overturning circulation have a strong influence on European temperatures, North American sea level and other climate phenomena worldwide. A meaningful assessment of associated societal impacts needs to be based on the full range of its possible future evolution. This requires capturing both the uncertainty in future warming pathways and the inherently long-term response of the ocean circulation. While probabilistic projections of the global mean and regional temperatures exist, process-based probabilistic assessments of large-scale dynamical systems such as the Atlantic overturning are still missing. Here we present such an assessment and find that a reduction of more than 50 % in Atlantic overturning strength by the end of the 21 century is within the likely range under an unmitigated climate change scenario (RCP8.5). By combining linear response functions derived from comprehensive climate simulations with the full range of possible future warming pathways, we provide probability estimates of overturning changes by the year 2100. A weakening of more than 25 % is found to be very unlikely under a climate protection scenario (RCP2.6), but likely for unmitigated climate change. The method is able to reproduce the modelled recovery caused by climatic equilibration under climate protection scenarios which provides confidence in the approach. Within this century, a reduction of the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10584-014-1265-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. C.-F. Schleussner · A. Levermann · M. Meinshausen Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany C.-F. Schleussner ( ) Climate Analytics, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Levermann Institute of Physics, Potsdam University, Potsdam, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Meinshausen School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia e-mail: [email protected]