Can the boundary profiles at 26°&thinsp;N be used to extract buoyancy-forced Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation signals?

Polo, Irene; Haines, Keith; Robson, Jon; Thomas, Christopher

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/os-16-1067-2020

Articles | Volume 16, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/os-16-1067-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/os-16-1067-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 5

Research article

|

18 Sep 2020

Research article |

| 18 Sep 2020

Can the boundary profiles at 26° N be used to extract buoyancy-forced Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation signals?

Irene Polo, Keith Haines, Jon Robson, and Christopher Thomas

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Final revised paper (published on 18 Sep 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 21 Feb 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of Polo et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 22 Apr 2020
- AC1: 'Response to referee 1', Irene Polo, 18 Jun 2020
RC2: 'review comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 23 Apr 2020
- AC2: 'Response to referee 2', Irene Polo, 18 Jun 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Irene Polo on behalf of the Authors (19 Jun 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (25 Jun 2020) by Ilker Fer

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (29 Jun 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

In the authors’ response to the reviewers’ comments it would have been helpful if they stated explicitly how the paper has been changed in response to the comments. For example, in response to comments 9 and 11 the authors discuss the comment made by the review, but only by reading the paper is it clear that no changes were made, Mostly the authors have responded but there are still details of the paper that should be improved.

Axes are now labelled (Comment 1 in initial review). But there area still errors in the labels e.g. lower case ‘k’ should be used in ‘km’ and ‘kg’, and the units of temperature are °C not C

The captions still need to be proof read. E.g. Figure 2 “Timeseries have been de-seasonalised and de-trended and standardised.” The first “and” should be a comma. Figure 3 “The EOFs are performed after removing seasonal cycle, linear trend and depth weighting pre-processing is applied.” is not correct, but maybe it is not needed at all as the details are in the text. These are examples and I have not checked the paper thoroughly. I recommend that all the authors proof read all of the paper

My original comment 10 was not well expressed. What I meant was that a change in density of 0.001 kg/m^3 is extremely small and would be very difficult to detect in observations.

About comment 11 and the new figure 10. While it may not affect the conclusions, I do think that it is important to highlight the impact of the length of the period on the interquartile range of the correlations. Not all box plots are the same so I think the caption to Figure 10 should state what the boxes and lines represent. Presumably “points between 1.5 and 3 times the Inter-Quartile Range (IQR) are marked with crosses” should be “points between 1.5 and 3 times the Inter-Quartile Range (IQR) from the median”

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (07 Jul 2020) by Ilker Fer

AR by Irene Polo on behalf of the Authors (17 Jul 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (25 Jul 2020) by Ilker Fer

AR by Irene Polo on behalf of the Authors (29 Jul 2020) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

AMOC variability controls climate and is driven by wind and buoyancy forcing in the Atlantic. Density changes there are expected to connect to tropical regions. We develop methods to identify boundary density profiles at 26° N which relate to the AMOC. We found that density anomalies propagate equatorward along the western boundary, eastward along the Equator and then poleward up the eastern boundary with 2 years lag between boundaries. Record lengths of more than 26 years are required.