Tree-Ring Analysis of Regional to Large-Scale Paleoclimate

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This award supports the development of an array of millennium- long tree-ring chronologies for the southeastern USA. These long chronologies are sensitive to precipitation, and reflect anomalies in large-scale atmospheric circulation over eastern North American and the western North Atlantic. This work will also develop centuries-long chronologies in the southern Great Plains and Mexico which are sensitive to anomalies in the EL Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the most important known cause of interannual to decadal variation in global climate. The network of ENSO- sensitive tree-ring chronologies will be expanded in Mexico and the Southeast in order to develop longer ENSO reconstructions, to explore possible changes in the ENSO phenomenon during the Little Ice Age, and to estimate the frequency of ENSO extremes such as the 1982-83 warm event. The potential for dendroclimatology will also be explored in East Africa, where and ENSO influence on climate has been detected, but where long, annual climate proxies are not presently available. The proposed research will provide unique paleoclimatic data that will help define the natural variability of climate, and may help evaluate GCM-simulations of climate during global warm and cool episodes of the late Holocene.