Evidence of multidecadal salinity variability in the eastern tropical North Atlantic

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2006. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Paleoceanography 21 (2006): PA3010, doi:10.1029/2005PA001257. Ocean circulation and global cli...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors Moses, Christopher S, Swart, Peter K, Rosenheim, Brad E
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published American Geophysical Union 17.08.2006
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Summary:Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2006. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Paleoceanography 21 (2006): PA3010, doi:10.1029/2005PA001257. Ocean circulation and global climate are strongly influenced byseawater density, which is itself controlled by salinity and temperature.Although adequate instrumental sea-surface temperature (SST) recordsexist for most of the surface oceans over the past 100-150 years, records ofsalinity really only exist for the last 40-50 years. Here we show thatlonger proxy records from corals (Siderastrea radians) in the easterntropical North Atlantic are dominated by multi-decadal variations insalinity which are correlated with the relationship between SST and theNorth Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) over the course of the 20th century. Thedata reveal an increase in eastern tropical North Atlantic salinity of +0.5psu between about 1950-1990. Rather than a monotonic secular increase,as indicated by some instrumental records, the pre-instrumental coralproxy records presented here suggest that salinity in the tropical NorthAtlantic is periodic on a decadal to multi-decadal scale.