Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.1038/s41467-024-52524-x

Publication Title

Nature Communications

Volume

15

Issue

1

Pages

8190 (1-13)

Abstract

Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW), which supplies the lower limb of the thermohaline circulation, originates from dense shelf water (DSW) forming in Antarctic polynyas. Here, combining a long mooring record of DSW measurements with numerical simulations and satellite data, we show that significant correlation exists between interannual variability of DSW production in the Ross Sea polynyas, where DSW contributes between 20-40% of the global AABW production, and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). The correlation is largest when the Amundsen Sea Low (ASL) is weakened and shifted east of the Ross Sea. During positive SAM phases, enhanced offshore winds and lower air temperatures over the western Ross Sea increase sea ice production and promote DSW formation, with the opposite response during negative SAM phases. These processes ultimately modulate AABW thickness in the open ocean. A projected positive shift of the SAM and eastward displacement of the ASL thus has implications for the future of DSW and AABW formation.

Rights

© 2024 The Authors.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "Atmospheric data are provided by the ECWMF ERA5 reanalysis product (https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era5). Sea ice concentration data are obtained from Version 2 of the Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS Passive Microwave Data available at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (https://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0051/versions/2). Sea ice production data are archived at the website of the Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido University (http://www.lowtem.hokudai.ac.jp/wwwod/polar-seaflux/). Bottom water measurements from the two moorings near Cape Adare are collected by the Cape Adare Long-term Mooring (CALM) program (https://www.marine-geo.org/tools/search/entry.php?id=NBP0801). SAM indices are provided by the British Antarctic Survey (https://legacy.bas.ac.uk/met/gjma/sam.html) and the ASL indices are available at http://scotthosking.com/asl_index. Observational and model simulation data processed for making the display items in this manuscript are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13702232. Hydrographic data collected by the mooring in the Terra Nova Bay are available from the MORSea website (morsea.uniparthenope.it) upon request."

Original Publication Citation

Zhang, Z., Xie, C., Castagno, P., England, M. H., Wang, X., Dinniman, M. S., Silvano, A., Wang, C., Zhou, L., Li, X., Zhou, M., & Budillon, G. (2024). Evidence for large-scale climate forcing of dense shelf water variability in the Ross Sea. Nature Communications, 15(1), 1-13, Article 8190. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-52524-x

ORCID

0000-0001-7519-9278 (Dinniman)

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