In an attempt to elucidate the role of atmospheric and oceanic processes in setting a vigorous ocean overturning circulation in the North Atlantic but not in the North Pacific, a comparison of the observed atmospheric circulation and net surface freshwater fluxes over the North Atlantic and Pacific basins is conducted. It is proposed that the more erratic meridional displacements of the atmosph...

Purpose of Review Recent Atlantic climate prediction studies are an exciting new contribution to an extensive body of research on Atlantic decadal variability and predictability that has long emphasized the unique role of the Atlantic Ocean in modulating the surface climate. We present a survey of the foundations and frontiers in our understanding of Atlantic variability mechanisms, the role of...

[1] We develop an empirically constrained multicompartment box model for mercury cycling in open ocean regions to investigate changes in concentrations resulting from anthropogenic perturbations of the global mercury cycle. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we explicitly consider the effects of variability in measured parameters on modeled seawater concentrations. Our simulations show that anthrop...

The deep ocean conditions and circulation during the Cretaceous have been characterized mainly by the sediments from the Tethys Sea and the proto-Atlantic Ocean, because sedimentological data from the Pacific basin from that period have been quite limited. Here we present new geochemical measurements from sediments that we collected from two sites in Hokkaido, Japan, that were presumably deposi...

The second half of the 20th century showed a series of decadal-scale anomalies of salinity, temperature and sea ice cover in the northern North Atlantic. One pronounced event, the 'great salinity anomaly' (GSA) is observed in the late 1060s and the early 1970s (Dickson et al., 1988). This anomaly can be linked to the sea ice volume out of the Arctic through Fram Strait, which represents a major...

Previous investigations of the large-scale deployment of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversions (OTEC) systems are extended by allowing some atmospheric feedback in an ocean general circulation model. A modified ocean-atmosphere thermal boundary condition is used where relaxation corresponds to atmospheric longwave radiation to space, and an additional term expresses horizontal atmospheric transport....

The summertime variability of the extratropical storm track over the Atlantic sector and its links to European climate have been analysed for the period 1948–2011 using observations and reanalyses. The main results are as follows. (1) The dominant mode of the summer storm track density variability is characterized by a meridional shift of the storm track between two distinct paths and is relate...

Approximately synchronous with the onset of Heinrich Stadial 1 (HS1), δC decreased throughout most of the upper (~1000–2500m) Atlantic, and at some deeper North Atlantic sites. This early deglacial δC decrease has been alternatively attributed to a reduced fraction of high-δC North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) or to a decrease in the NADW δC source value. Here we present new benthic δO and δC rec...

A 1200-yr unforced control run and future climate change simulations using the Parallel Climate Model (PCM), a coupled atmosphere–ocean–land–sea ice global model with no flux adjustments and relatively high resolution ( 2.8° for the atmosphere and 2/3° for the oceans) are analyzed for changes in Atlantic Ocean circulations. For the forced simulations, historical greenhouse gas and sulfate forci...

Numerical experiments are performed to examine the causes of variability of Atlantic Ocean SST during the period covered by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction–National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP–NCAR) reanalysis (1958–98). Three ocean models are used. Two are mixed layer models: one with a 75-m-deep mixed layer and the other with a variable depth mixed layer. For both ...