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Moisture transport from the Atlantic to the Pacific basin and its response to North Atlantic cooling and global warming

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Abstract

Atmospheric moisture transport from the Atlantic to the Pacific basin plays an important role in regulating North Atlantic salinity and thus the strength of the thermohaline circulation. Potential changes in the strength of this moisture transport are investigated for two different climate-change scenarios: North Atlantic cooling representative of Heinrich events, and increased greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing. The effect of North Atlantic cooling is studied using a coupled regional model with comparatively high resolution that successfully simulates Central American gap winds and other important aspects of the region. Cooler North Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) in this model leads to a regional decrease of atmospheric moisture but also to an increase in wind speed across Central America via an anomalous pressure gradient. The latter effect dominates, resulting in a 0.13 Sv (1 Sv = 106 m3 s−1) increase in overall moisture transport to the Pacific basin. In fresh water forcing simulations with four different general circulation models, the wind speed effect is also present but not strong enough to completely offset the effect of moisture decrease except in one model. The influence of GHG forcing is studied using simulations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change archive. In these simulations atmospheric moisture increases globally, resulting in an increase of moisture transport by 0.25 Sv from the Atlantic to Pacific. Thus, in both scenarios, moisture transport changes act to stabilize the thermohaline circulation. The notion that the Andes effectively block moisture transport from the Atlantic to the Pacific basin is not supported by the simulations and atmospheric reanalyses examined here. This indicates that such a blocking effect does not exist or else that higher resolution is needed to adequately represent the steep orography of the Andes.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the NOAA Climate Program Office, and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) through its sponsorship of the International Pacific Research Center. The authors are grateful to the following individuals for generously providing us with their water hosing data: Ronald Stouffer and Jianjun Yin (GFDL CM 2.1), Aixue Hu (NCAR CCSM 2.0), Jonathan Gregory and Kevin Marsh (UKMO HadCM 3), and Guido Vettoretti (UToronto). The authors wish to thank Justin Small for help in the moisture transport calculations and valuable comments on the manuscript. Thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. IPRC/SOEST publication #660/7857.

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  1. Ingo Richter

    Present address: Research Institute for Global Change, JAMSTEC, Yokohama, Japan

Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Ingo Richter & Shang-Ping Xie

  2. Department of Meteorology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Shang-Ping Xie

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  1. Ingo Richter
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Correspondence to Ingo Richter.

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Richter, I., Xie, SP. Moisture transport from the Atlantic to the Pacific basin and its response to North Atlantic cooling and global warming. Clim Dyn 35, 551–566 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-009-0708-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-009-0708-3

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