The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation in the waters surrounding the Faroes

The Faroe-AMOC project will study the climatically important warm and cold water flows between the North Atlantic and the Arctic. In this region, the subsurface Greenland-Scotland Ridge acts as a natural barrier for both northward flow of warm and saline Atlantic Water in the upper layers and southward flow of cold Overflow Water at depth. Together, these flows feed the northernmost component of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) delivering heat to the Arctic region. According to most climate models, the basin scale AMOC is likely to weaken during this century, but much more uncertainty exists for the northernmost components. Any substantial change in these flows will affect the oceanic heat transport into the Arctic and have large impacts on marine ecosystems. Knowledge about future changes in the waters surrounding the Faroes is limited by the coarse spatial resolution of climate models, but in recent years, the development of high-resolution ocean models nested within larger models has evolved that offers new insight to climate model deficiencies and gives a framework for analysing observations. In Faroe-AMOC focus is on the Iceland-Faroe Ridge, but also on the larger Iceland-Scotland region where data from existing simulations and observations from the recent two decades will be utilized. A PhD candidate will be hired by the project and together with the project partners, the interaction between warm and cold water flows will be addressed, including water mass modifications and simulations of the flows.

The project is funded by the National Centre for Climate Research at DMI and the Research Council Faroe Islands