Revisiting Stommel's model for the understanding of the abrupt climate change

Despite the enormous number of papers devoted to modelling climate changes, the pionieristic Stommel paper (1961) remains a still valid tool for the understanding of the basic mechanism that governs the abrupt climate change, i.e. the existence of multipla equilibria in the governing non-linear equations. Using nondimensional quantities, Stommel did not provide any explicit information about the temporal scale affecting the process under examination when the control parameters are varied. On the basis of this consideration, the present paper revisits the Stommel theory putting some emphasis on the quantitative estimate of how the variations of the control system parameters system modify the fundamental motor of the climate change, i.e. the thermohaline circulation.