Observed change and the extent of coherence in the Gulf Stream system

Asbjørnsen, Helene; Eldevik, Tor; Skrefsrud, Johanne; Johnson, Helen L.; Sanchez-Franks, Alejandra

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/os-20-799-2024

Articles | Volume 20, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/os-20-799-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/os-20-799-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 3

Research article

|

18 Jun 2024

Research article |

| 18 Jun 2024

Observed change and the extent of coherence in the Gulf Stream system

Helene Asbjørnsen, Tor Eldevik, Johanne Skrefsrud, Helen L. Johnson, and Alejandra Sanchez-Franks

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/os-20-799-2024-supplement

Data sets

ERA5 monthly averaged data on single levels from 1940 to present H. Hersbach et al. https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.f17050d7

Oleander is More than a Flower: Twenty-Five Years of Oceanography Aboard a Merchant Vessel (https://oleander.bios.asu.edu/data/oleander-fluxes/) T. Rossby et al. https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2019.319

Florida Current transport variability: An analysis of annual and longer-period signals (www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/floridacurrent/) C. S. Meinen et al. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.DSR.2010.04.001

Mooring data from the Barents Sea Opening - Atlantic Water inflow R. Ingvaldsen https://doi.org/10.21335/NMDC-1838527821

Meridional Overturning Circulation Observed by the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP) Array from August 2014 to June 2020 Y. Fu et al. https://doi.org/10.35090/gatech/70342

Short summary

The Gulf Stream system is essential for northward ocean heat transport. Here, we use observations along the path of the extended Gulf Stream system and an observationally constrained ocean model to investigate variability in the Gulf Stream system since the 1990s. We find regional differences in the variability between the subtropical, subpolar, and Nordic Seas regions, which warrants caution in using observational records at a single latitude to infer large-scale circulation change.