Organization of Historical Oceanic Overturnings on Cross-Sphere Climate Signals

Abstract

The global ocean meridional overturning circulation (GMOC) is central for ocean transport and climate variations. However, a comprehensive picture of its historical mean state and variability remains vague due to limitations in modelling and observing systems. Incorporating observations into models offers a viable approach to reconstructing climate history, yet achieving coherent estimates of GMOC has proven challenging due to difficulties in harmonizing ocean stratification. Here, we demonstrate that applying multiscale data assimilation scheme that integrates atmospheric and oceanic observations into multiple coupled models in a dynamically consistent way, the global ocean currents and GMOC over the past 80 years are retrieved. While the major historic events are printed in variability of the rebuilt GMOC, the timeseries of multisphere 3-dimensional physical variables representing the realistic historical evolution enable us to advance understanding of mechanisms of climate signal propagation cross spheres and give birth to Artificial Intelligence coupled big models, thus advancing the Earth science.