University of Bremen: EPOC: 1.1 million for marine research

The working group of Professor Monika Rhein (Institute for Environmental Physics and MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen) has now raised 1.1 million euros as part of a large European research project. The content is about the upheaval in the Atlantic.
What role does the meridional overturning movement in the Atlantic – AMOC for short – play for our climate? Is the AMOC really a continuous conveyor belt for heat and salt from the tropics to the arctic? How important are regional interactions and how is the AMOC acting in the climate crisis? These are just some of the questions that a consortium of 13 European institutes in the EU project EPOC (Explaining and Predicting the Ocean conveyor) hopes to answer over the next five years.

For success, state-of-the-art climate and ocean models must be evaluated together with observations. Monika Rhein’s working group based at the IUP and MARUM will, among other things, conduct a field study to investigate the processes that maintain or disrupt the meridional connectivity of the AMOC.

The first ship expedition will be in 2023 under the leadership of Dr. Christian Mertens (IUP) will take place. The destination of the cruise is the transition zone between the subpolar and subtropical North Atlantic, a region where models show a breakdown in meridional AMOC coherence. From Germany, in addition to the University of Bremen, the Alfred Wegener Institute, the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (Bremerhaven), the University of Hamburg and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (Hamburg) are involved.