The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) plays an important role in regional and global climate variability. Driven by the heat exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean its surface branch transports heat from equatorial regions to high latitudes thereby affecting the climate in the entire Northern Hemisphere (cf., Dickson et al., 1988;Dommenget & Latif, 2002;Gulev et al., 2001). Many studies have focused on the processes controlling present and past Atlantic deep water convection and water mass formation to improve our understanding of the factors driving AMOC variability and to achieve more realistic climate predictions (