Acknowledgments and Data Availability Statement

We used the Niño3.4 index (Rayner et al., 2003) as provided by NOAA on their website athttps://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/gcos_wgsp/Timeseries/Nino34/. Data from the RAPID MOC monitoring project are funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and are freely available fromwww.rapid.ac.uk/rapidmoc. Furthermore we used ERA5 reanalysis data (Hersbach et al., 2020) provided at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/home. The simulations were performed at the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ). We thank the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg (MPI) for providing us with the ECHAM6 model code and for the fruitful discussions with various colleagues from this institute. All data are available on the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) (Semmler et al., 2018). H. F. Goessling and L. Mu acknowledge the financial support of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany in the framework of the research group Seamless Sea Ice Prediction (SSIP; Grant 01LN1701A). N. Khosravi and C. Hinrichs have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme through grant agreement No. 727862 APPLICATE. This paper is a contribution to the projects S1 (Diagnosis and Metrics in Climate Models) and S2 (Improved parameterizations and numerics in climate models) of the Collaborative Research Centre TRR 181 “Energy Transfer in Atmosphere and Ocean” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project no. 274762653. D. Sein was supported by EC Horizon 2020 project PRIMAVERA under the grant agreement no. 641727, the state assignment of FASO Russia theme No. R0149-2019-0015. Q. Wang and D. Sidorenko were supported by the Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM (Regional Climate Change). The work described in this paper has received funding from the Helmholtz Association through the project “Advanced Earth System Model Capacity” in the frame of the initiative “Zukunftsthemen”. The content of the paper is the sole responsibility of the authors and it does not represent the opinion of the Helmholtz Association, and the Helmholtz Association is not responsible for any use that might be made of information contained.