Impact of atmospheric feedbacks on the stability of the thermohaline circulation in the Atlantic ocean

This question has been asked several times in literature during the last decade, but no final answer is widely accepted. Idealised and simpler general circulation models apparently contradict the results of state of the art computations. While the former ones hint at the existence of a stable collapsed state and multiple equilibria, the latter do not show such behaviour. Understanding the relative importance of the salt advection feedback in the ocean and of the response of the atmosphere to a thermohaline circulation depression is a crucial point in this work. A combined approach is developed to start answering these questions, focusing on the physical mechanisms that may change the stability properties of density driven circulation.