SNAP-DRAGON

The subpolar North Atlantic Ocean occupies a key role in regional and global climate, yet is poorly represented in climate models, which limits our confidence in predictions. Recent Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP) and other data reveal significant subpolar ocean variability, but raise questions about the processes that give rise to this variability and that link it to atmospheric changes. We bring the observations together with numerical ocean and climate models to make a step change in our understanding of subpolar North Atlantic variability by exposing the time-dependent causal relationships governing subpolar ocean variability, their robustness across models and their implications for predictability.

This project is a UK-US collaboration led by Helen Johnson (Oxford) together with Penny Holliday (NOC Southampton) and many co-PIs and collaborators. UK funding is provided by the National Environmental Research Council (NERC) and US funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF).