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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub"></issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-2961</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Aerosol&amp;ndash;cloud interactions influence the climate response to AMOC weakening</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Vella</surname>
<given-names>Ryan</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0748-9286</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Lohmann</surname>
<given-names>Ulrike</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8885-3785</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>02</day>
<month>06</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>28</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Ryan Vella</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2961/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2961/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2961/egusphere-2026-2961.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2961/egusphere-2026-2961.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) strongly influences regional climate, yet the response of atmospheric aerosols and aerosol-cloud interactions to its weakening remains largely unexplored. Using the ICON-HAM model, we investigate how a 60 % AMOC weakening affects aerosol distributions, cloud microphysics, and radiative budgets. The weakening of the AMOC drives a hemispheric aerosol redistribution through purely dynamical pathways, increasing the Northern Hemisphere aerosol burden by 5 % through enhanced Saharan dust emissions and extended aerosol lifetimes under suppressed wet deposition. Averaged over 40&amp;ndash;90&amp;deg; N, these perturbations propagate into cloud properties via both liquid and ice-phase pathways. In-cloud droplet number concentrations increase by 8 % in warm clouds and 13 % in the mixed-phase regime. In the ice phase, enhanced dust ice-nucleating particles produce a 37 % increase in mixed-phase ice crystal number concentrations through multiple heterogeneous freezing pathways, promoting the Wegener-Bergeron-Findeisen process and reducing mixed-phase total water path by 8 %. The global-mean net cloud radiative effect (CRE) anomaly is +0.84 W m&lt;sup&gt;-2&lt;/sup&gt;, acting as a negative feedback that partially offsets AMOC-induced cooling. A linear decomposition reveals that this positive CRE arises not from cloud loss, but from a reduction in the cooling efficiency of existing clouds, which more than offsets the enhanced cooling from increased cloud cover. Our findings demonstrate that aerosol-cloud interactions form an active component of the climate response to AMOC weakening, exposing a critical gap in simulations that rely on prescribed aerosol fields.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="28"/></counts>
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