The DOI matches its Crossref record; 26 of the 26 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
A change in the freshwater balance of the Atlantic Ocean over the past four decades
Open accessAbstract
The oceans are a global reservoir and redistribution agent for several important constituents of the Earth's climate system, among them heat, fresh water and carbon dioxide. Whereas these constituents are actively exchanged with the atmosphere, salt is a component that is approximately conserved in the ocean. The distribution of salinity in the ocean is widely measured, and can therefore be used to diagnose rates of surface freshwater fluxes, freshwater transport and local ocean mixing—important components of climate dynamics. Here we present a comparison of salinities on a long transect (50° S to 60° N) through the western basins of the Atlantic Ocean between the 1950s and the 1990s. We find systematic freshening at both poleward ends contrasted with large increases of salinity pervading the upper water column at low latitudes. Our results extend a growing body of evidence indicating that shifts in the oceanic distribution of fresh and saline waters are occurring worldwide in ways that suggest links to global warming and possible changes in the hydrologic cycle of the Earth.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis
Cooper, R. N., Houghton, J. T., McCarthy, J. J., & Metz, B. (2002) · Foreign Affairs · doi:10.2307/20033020 · Cited by 12,889
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
(2012) · Reference Reviews · doi:10.1108/09504121211205250 · Cited by 4,477
Müller, G., Pannhorst, W., & Schiffner, U. (1995) · Schott Series on Glass and Glass Ceramics · doi:10.1007/978-3-662-03083-7_2 · Cited by 1,982
Peixoto, J. P., & Oort, A. H. (1992) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 1,943
Increasing River Discharge to the Arctic Ocean
Peterson, B. J., Holmes, R. M., McClelland, J. W., Vörösmarty, C. J., Lammers, R. B., Shiklomanov, A. I., Shiklomanov, I. A., & Rahmstorf, S. (2002) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1077445 · Cited by 1,505
Levitus, S., Antonov, J. I., Boyer, T. P., & Stephens, C. (2000) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.287.5461.2225 · Cited by 1,474
North Atlantic climate variability: phenomena, impacts and mechanisms
Marshall, J., Kushnir, Y., Battisti, D., Chang, P., Czaja, A., Dickson, R., Hurrell, J., McCartney, M., Saravanan, R., & Visbeck, M. (2001) · International Journal of Climatology · doi:10.1002/joc.693 · Cited by 969
The mixed layer of the western equatorial Pacific Ocean
Lukas, R., & Lindstrom, E. (1991) · Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans · doi:10.1029/90jc01951 · Cited by 919
Surface Climate Variations over the North Atlantic Ocean during Winter: 1900–1989
Deser, C., & Blackmon, M. L. (1993) · Journal of Climate · doi:10.1175/1520-0442(1993)006<1743:scvotn>2.0.co;2 · Cited by 760
Control of atmospheric export of dust from North Africa by the North Atlantic Oscillation
Moulin, C., Lambert, C. E., Dulac, F., & Dayan, U. (1997) · Nature · doi:10.1038/42679 · Cited by 723
Cited by
Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system
Lenton, T. M., Held, H., Kriegler, E., Hall, J. W., Lucht, W., Rahmstorf, S., & Schellnhuber, H. J. (2008) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0705414105 · Cited by 3,982
Evidence for intensification of the global water cycle: Review and synthesis
Huntington, T. G. (2006) · Journal of Hydrology · doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2005.07.003 · Cited by 2,374
Ocean salinities reveal strong global water cycle intensification during 1950 to 2000.
Durack, P. J., Wijffels, S. E., & Matear, R. J. (2012) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1212222 · Cited by 1,070
Roemmich, D., & Gilson, J. (2009) · Progress in Oceanography · doi:10.1016/j.pocean.2009.03.004 · Cited by 1,016
Influence of the Atlantic Subpolar Gyre on the Thermohaline Circulation
Hátún, H., Sandø, A. B., Drange, H., Hansen, B., & Valdimarsson, H. (2005) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1114777 · Cited by 688
Metadata
- Authors
- Curry, R., Dickson, B., & Yashayaev, I.
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2003-12
- Volume
- 426
- Issue
- 6968
- Pages
- 826-829
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W2024479656
- Cited by
- 560
- References
- 26
- FWCI
- 32.56
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A change in the freshwater balance of the Atlantic Ocean over the past four decades. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/nature02206
- The paper
- Curry, R., Dickson, B., & Yashayaev, I. (2003). A change in the freshwater balance of the Atlantic Ocean over the past four decades. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02206
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
