CliMOC (Climate Impacts of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) was an Individual MSCA Fellowship that ran for 2 years (01/06/2021-31/05/2023). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101026907.
The main objective of CliMOC was to assess the influence of a weakening AMOC on the global climate, in the context of human induced climate change.To address this issue we ran climate model simulations with EC-Earth3, a state-of-the-art climate model participating in CMIP6, in which we artificially weakened AMOC strength my modifying salinity in the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean north of 50°N. This kind of experiments is usually called ‘water hosing’, although as a matter of fact, in our design the volume of water of the global ocean is conserved since we locally modify a virtual salinity flux for which we compensate in the rest of the global ocean. We also investigated the impacts of weakening AMOC in state-of-the-art models participating in the CMIP5 and CMIP6 archives.
You can read more about the outcome of this research in the following publications:
Bellomo K., V. Meccia, F. Fabiano, R. D’Agostino, S. Larson, J. von Hardenberg, and S. Corti, 2023: Impacts of a weakened AMOC on precipitation over the Euro-Atlantic sector in the EC-Earth3 climate model. Climate Dynamics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06754-2. [link]
Jackson L., E. Alastrue-De-Asenjo, K. Bellomo, G. Danabasoglu, A. Hu, J. Jungclaus, V. Meccia, O. Saenko, A. Shao, and D. Swingedouw, 2023: AMOC thresholds in CMIP6 models: NAHosMIP. Geoscientific Model Development. [link]
Mehling O.*, K. Bellomo, M. Angeloni, C. Pasquero, J. von Hardenberg, 2022: High-latitude precipitation as a driver of multicentennial variability of the AMOC. Climate Dynamics. [link]
Meccia V., R. Fuentes-Franco, P. Davini, K.Bellomo, F. Fabiano, S. Yang, and J. von Hardenberg, 2022: Internal multi-centennial variability of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation simulated by EC-Earth3. Climate Dynamics. [link]