Long-term changes of wind-generated ocean waves have important consequences for marine engineering, coastal management, ship routing, and marine spatial planning. It is well-known that the multi-annual variability of wave parameters in the North Atlantic is tightly linked to natural fluctuations of the atmospheric circulation, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation. However, anthropogenic climate change is also expected to influence sea states over the long-term through the modification of atmospheric and ocean circulation and melting of sea ice. Due to the relatively short duration of historical sea state observations and the significant multi-decadal variability in the sea state signal, disentangling the anthropogenic signal from the natural variability is a challenging task. In this article, the literature on inter-annual to multi-decadal variability of sea states in the North Atlantic is reviewed using data from both observations and model reanalysis.

Large-scale baroclinic instability is investigated as a potential source of Rossby waves and large-scale variability in the ocean. This baroclinic instability is first reviewed in a 2.5-layer model. As already noticed by several authors, the instability arises in westward surface mean flow when the phase velocities of the two vertical modes are made equal by mean flow influence. This large-scale instability is stronger at low latitudes and thus is likely to happen in the westward return flow of the subtropical gyres. Further investigations with a continuous stratification quasigeostrophic model show that the instability is stronger where the mean flow projects negatively on the second baroclinic mode (imposing positive vertical modes at the surface). The linear stability calculation is then performed on Argo-derived mean flow along with mean stratification data. The results show that the unstable regions are situated at low latitudes in every oceanic basin, in western boundary currents, and in some part of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The location of these unstable regions is well correlated with the region of negative projection of the mean flow on the second baroclinic mode. Given that the unstable mode growth times are generally smaller than 6 months at low latitudes, these unstable modes are likely to be observable in satellite altimetry. Therefore, results of the present article suggest that the large-scale instability is indeed a source of large-scale variability at low latitudes.

Holmes et al. (2019) have proposed a new theoretical framework for studying ocean heat uptake in potential temperature coordinates. One important step in their derivations requires understanding the temporal changes of the volume of water V with temperature greater than some value, which they write as the sum of two terms. The first one is due to the surface freshwater fluxes and is well defined, but the second one—attributed to the volume fluxes through the lower boundary of the domain—is given no explicit expression. What the authors mean exactly is unclear, however, because in the incompressible Boussinesq approximation, the use of a divergenceless velocity field implies that the sum of the volume fluxes through any kind of control volume must integrate to zero at all times. In this comment, we provide two alternative explicit mathematical expressions linking the volume change of Holmes et al. (2019) to the diabatic sources and sinks of heat that clarify their result. By contrasting Holmes et al.’s (2019) approach with that for a fully compressible ocean, it is concluded that the volume considered by Holmes et al. (2019) is best interpreted as a proxy for the Boussinesq mass M0 = ρ0 V, where ρ0 is the reference Boussinesq density. If V were truly meant to represent volume rather than a proxy for the Boussinesq mass, the Boussinesq expression for dV/ dt would have to be regarded as inaccurate because of its neglect of the volume changes resulting from mean density changes.