What Is the Thermohaline Circulation?

@article{2002WhatIT,
  title={What Is the Thermohaline Circulation?},
  author={},
  journal={Science},
  year={2002},
  volume={298},
  pages={1179 - 1181},
  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:129518576}
}
  • Published in 8 November 2002
  • Environmental Science
The term "thermohaline circulation" is widely used in the context of past and future climate change. In his Perspective, Wunsch argues that there are many different, and inconsistent, definitions for this term. He defines ocean circulation in terms of mass fluxes, which are largely driven by surface forces such as wind and tides, and argues that thermohaline circulation should only refer to the separate transport of heat and salinity in the ocean. 

A gallery of simple models from climate physics

The climate system of the earth is one of the most complex systems presently investigated by scientists. The physical compartments — atmosphere, hydrosphere and cryosphere — can be described by

Long-term impacts of mixotrophy on ocean carbon storage: insights from a 10,000-year global model simulation

. Mixotrophs — organisms that combine the use of light and inorganic resources with the ingestion of prey — have been shown in simulations to increase mean organism size and carbon export. These

The effect of geometry on ice shelf ocean cavity ventilation: a laboratory experiment

A laboratory experiment is constructed to simulate the density-driven circulation under an idealized Antarctic ice shelf and to investigate the flux of dense and freshwater in and out of the ice

A multimodel comparison of centennial Atlantic meridional overturning circulation variability

A mechanism contributing to centennial variability of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is tested with multi-millennial control simulations of several coupled general circulation

Thermobaric effect on slantwise convection in cold seawater

A theoretical investigation shows that the pressure dependence of the thermal expansion coefficient (the thermobaric effect) acts to destabilize stratified geostrophic flows when both temperature and

Bottom water production and its links with the thermohaline circulation

For more than a century it has been known that the abyssal basins of the world ocean are primarily occupied by relatively cold and fresh waters that originate in the Southern Ocean. Their

Combined influences of seasonal East Atlantic Pattern and North Atlantic Oscillation to excite Atlantic multidecadal variability in a climate model

The physical processes underlying the internal component of the Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV) are investigated from a 1,000-yr pre-industrial control simulation of the CNRM-CM5 model. The

Nonnormal perturbation growth and optimal excitation of the thermohaline circulation using a 2D zonally averaged ocean model

Generalized linear stability theory is used to calculate the optimal initial conditions that result in transient amplification of the thermohaline circulation (THC) in a zonallyaveraged single basin
...