Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation NEXT

Advanced understanding, increased predictability and international collaboration

The Project

AMOC-NEXT is a collaborative project that incorporates all relevant Atlantic regional components in order to decipherer how AMOC will evolve in the NEXT future and what its overall impact will be, from regional ecosystems and economies to global climate. The study of key yet little understood regional AMOC components will elucidate the starting and returning Atlantic limbs of the AMOC, which distribute essential climatic properties from both natural and anthropogenic sources.

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Consortium

AMOC-NEXT is focused on a better understanding and predictability of the ocean-climate nexus with specific attention to the role of the AMOC and its connections with the polar ocean regions. To achieve these goals, AMOC- NEXT has been designed in seven work packages that define and develop scientific and technical topics that build up into an AMOC Monitoring and Prediction System (AMPS). To carry out this aim, a consortium of high scientific and technical level, global vision and interconnected knowledge through multidisciplinary international profiles has been created. A total of 29 beneficiary partners from 17 different countries, spanning the entire Atlantic Ocean from North to South, and 10 associated partners from 4 countries have joint to constitute the AMOC-NEXT consortium.

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Methodology

WP1

WP1 will focus on the AMOC Observing System (AOS) as a whole: ocean in-situ, remote-sensing, coastal or open ocean observing capacity, supported by international, national or regional efforts, projects, programs or initiatives, sustained or not. Considering the upper and lower limb of the AMOC, WP1 will enhance the observing capacity, and support an improved monitoring of the AMOC state and its impacts through indicators (WP4) and capacity actions (WP6). WP1 will take into account existing and novel regional observing efforts (WP3) and AMOC numerical simulation outcomes (WP5), and will provide inputs to data integration (WP2).

WP2

WP2 will provide the infrastructure for managing the project data via a common microservices-based platform. WP2 will build the framework to share data amongst the different WP teams, and to disseminate the project results to open access repositories such as CMEMS or EMODnet.

WP3

The overall goal of WP3 is to advance in the design of an effective and comprehensive AMOC Observing System (AOS) by integrating, for the first time, all sustained (ongoing and new) observations of the AMOC’s key regional components into a unified framework.

WP4

The temporal and spatial AMOC variability has led to significant changes in indicators of key physical, biogeochemical and ecosystem properties. WP4 will characterize the strength, time-scales and patterns of changes in these indicators, in order to understand their interaction with circulation variability and to generate an integrated system view of their impacts on the Atlantic system.

WP5

Through an unprecedented analysis of the CMIP database and other simulations performed within EU Horizon 2020 programme, and the newly-synthesized observational data sets, WP5 will advance our understanding on key aspects of AMOC and its associated impacts on European and global climate and marine ecosystems, and will improve AMOC predictions and projections by developing emergent constraints that improve model simulations.

WP6

The overall aim of WP6 is to promote scientific-technological communication and citizen-stakeholder engagement regarding AMOC-related climate impacts. Besides presenting the project’s results to the scientific community, WP6 will work on capacity building and will disseminate the AMOC-related climate impacts to general public and relevant stakeholders while promoting sustainable citizen and governmental responses, under the basis of “one ocean, one health, one future”.

WP7

The aim of this WP is to accomplish the overall management and coordination of the AMOC-NEXT project and to ensure an appropriate TRL assessment of the technology developments.

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