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Abstract

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a driving force of the heat redistribution on our planet and has a particularly large impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere and Europe. It has been projected since the 1980s that the anthropogenic atmospheric CO2-concentration rise will weaken the AMOC. Such a change in AMOC intensity would lead to a change in European climate and extreme weather events. Therefore, it becomes crucial to understand how the AMOC responds to climate change.<br>Faith in the reliability of coupled model projections has been questioned due to a growing body of evidence that the multi-model mean of climate models disagrees with observational proxies for the AMOC, in particular in the mid-20th century. In turn, the reliability of these observational proxies has been questioned as they are not direct observations of the AMOC.<br>In this study, we present an AMOC reconstruction based on a simple layered model of the deep branch of the AMOC, trained with modern RAPID array measurements at 26N, in order to compute the AMOC from historic hydrographic data from the EN4 database. Our aim is to provide, in the light of modern direct observations, an answer on the reliability of AMOC reconstructions and historical climate simulations during the mid-20th century.