Intermittent Behavior in the AMOC-AMV Relationship

The connection between the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and the Atlantic multidecadal variability (AMV) is inspected in a suite of pre-industrial integrations from the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP6), using a change-point detection method to identify different AMOC-AMV co-variability regimes. A key finding of this study is that models robustly simulate multi-decadal windows where the AMV and the AMOC are essentially uncorrelated. These regimes coexist with longer periods with relatively high correlation. Drops and recoveries of correlation are found to be often abrupt and confined in a temporal window of the order of 10 years. Phenomenological evidence suggests that the no-correlation regimes may be explained by drops in the variance of the AMOC: a less variable meridional heat transport leads to a suppressed co-variability of the AMV, leaving a larger role for non-AMOC drivers, consistent with a non-stationary AMOC-stationary noise interpretative framework.