Here is a repost from earlier this year
Plinius, Yes the moisture transport changes salinity also but "pressure head " differences are what I was referring to. Here is a Q&A with Rebecca Woodgate.
Question from Sam: Why does the water flow from the Chukchi Sea into the Deep Basin?
Answer: I asked Chief Scientist Rebecca Woodgate to answer this question. She has been studying the physical oceanography of the Arctic for over a decade.
"We have some ideas of why water flows north through the Chukchi into the Arctic, and it's to do with the ocean and atmosphere circulation of the whole world. Basically, water evaporates from the Atlantic ocean, is carried over to the Pacific ocean by air currents, and rains back down on the Pacific. So now we have "too much" water in the Pacific and it has to get back somehow, so it flows back through the Chukchi Sea and the Arctic. That's part of it. The ocean currents could be doing the same sort of thing - pushing too much water into the Pacific, so it leaks out at the top into the Arctic. We call these effects "pressure head" effects, because there is more water on one side (the Pacific) than on the other (the Arctic) and so that drives a flow. It's the same effect as causes your toilet to flush - kinda. The winds drive the water in the Chukchi Sea too, but the average wind is actually towards the south, and tries to drive the water back south against this pressure head. The effect of the wind is however less than the pressure head effect, so on average the water still goes north."
El Nino does cause sea level rise in the Eastern Pacific and part of that water flows north and can be tracked on it's passage north along the Pacific coast by tide gauges . However it takes months to get to San Francisco and even longer to get all the way to the Bering Sea so any current sea level anomaly in the Bering Strait might have been influenced by 2014 conditions in Eastern tropical Pacific but that is only speculation .
For more info on this subject you might want to read references unthread by Neven # 2398 and Vergent # 2400.
Paul was also making claims about heat flux and the blob earlier on this site but when challenged he disappeared . So unless he is willing to reference his opinions and how he arrived at them Mr. Beckwith's info might be viewed with a certain amount of skepticism .