Stefan Gary

As a large-scale physical oceanographer, my overarching research focus is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC): a northward flow of relatively warm, shallow, and salty waters and the corresponding southward return flow of cold, deep, fresher waters.  As such, the AMOC impacts the global redistribution of heat and freshwater as well as the timescale and extent of oceanic anthropogenic carbon uptake.  For my PhD dissertation and associated publications, my collaborators and I showed that a signficant component of the deep flow follows a broad, distributed pathway though the interior of the Atlantic in addition to a generally accepted pathway along the Deep Western Boundary Current.  This result is important because the interior pathway is much slower than the boundary pathway, prompting a reevaluation of the timescales of the AMOC.  More recently, I have also explored the fate of temperature anomalies in Eighteen Degree Water (EDW), a watermass embedded in the upper layer of the AMOC.  Now, I am investigating heat and freshwater fluxes in the subpolar North Atlantic by conducting observations with ships and gliders on the Extended Ellett Line (http://prj.noc.ac.uk/ExtendedEllettLine/).