Due to the importance of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) in the transport and storage of heat, freshwater, carbon, and nutrients, considerable efforts from the international ocean and climate community over the past two decades have sought to observe and model the AMOC. As a consequence, significant progress has been made in understanding of the AMOC’s role in the climate system through its interactions with the atmosphere on seasonal to multi-decadal time scales. Nevertheless, challenges remain with many unresolved questions that include: spatial coherency of AMOC and associated time scales; and robust driving mechanisms of AMOC variability. Better syntheses of observations, paleo proxies, and models are required to examine AMOC over longer time scales, as well as to address how knowledge of the AMOC could enhance climate predictions. Improved integration of physical and biogeochemical observations is needed to understand the role of AMOC in carbon and nutrient budgets.

We invite contributions from observational (instrumental or proxy) and modelling studies of the AMOC and its impacts on climate on all time scales.

• OM - Ocean Modeling
• PS - Physical Oceanography: Mesoscale and Smaller