Climate variability in North Atlantic to increase dramatically by mid-century

Clouds swirl in the Atlantic Ocean. Credit: NOAA GOES East

The North Atlantic Ocean plays a crucial role in regulating regional and global climates, but how its internal climate variability might change due to human-caused warming is unclear. Scientists published a study in Nature Communications addressing this issue using the Community Earth System Model 2 Large Ensemble (CESM2-LE) to simulate sea surface temperatures (SST) under historical and future climate scenarios. They found that the range of possible SST conditions in the northern North Atlantic could more than double by the mid-21st century, leading to vastly different climate outcomes. These differences seem to be triggered randomly by atmospheric conditions and then amplified by interactions between the ocean, atmosphere,