From February 26 to 28, 2025, the University of Utrecht hosted a workshop on abrupt changes in the North Atlantic subpolar gyre (SPG) gathering a many researchers focusing on the North Atlantic region and the AMOC – the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

TipESM Project Coordinator, Shuting Yang, and Marion Devilliers, who is contributing to the work in WP4 on Early warning indicators for TPs in the Earth system participated in the workshop and presented the poster, “Linking surface air temperature changes to a slowing AMOC in a multimodel approach”.

Check out the poster here: https://zenodo.org/records/14956448

Summary of the workshop

Previous modeling studies suggest that North Atlantic subpolar gyre (SPG) convection may exhibit abrupt changes and in some cases has been shown to collapse in response to global warming. These changes have been shown to have important climate impacts, yet may occur without a more severe collapse of the AMOC and hence this raises questions about the associated mechanisms. Do such abrupt changes reflect a persistent shift in SPG dynamics (“tipping point”) or do these changes simply reflect extreme anomalies in response to a forcing? And what is the role of the AMOC?

The aim of this workshop was to begin to address these questions by bringing together leading researchers on SPG dynamics. Current research on this topic was summarized through a series of presentations, and the participants worked together to define a protocol for modeling, detecting and understanding abrupt changes in the SPG through a series of discussions.