The circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean is changing. One notable expression of these changes is a regional cooling that is in striking contrast to the global trend; the ‘warming hole’. While the similarity between this cooling and the fingerprint of a weakening circulation in climate models has been used to argue that the decline in circulation present in virtually all simulations of future climate is already underway, this interpretation is controversial and recent observations call the hypothesized mechanism into question.
We will analyze coupled climate models to clarify how currents and other features of the North Atlantic Ocean interact.