The Record of ENSO in the Warm Pool of the Western Pacific: Multi-century Reconstructions from the Geochemistry of Long-lived Corals

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Abstract ATM-9311858 Cole, J.E. Title: The Record of ENSO in the Warm Pool of the Western Pacific: Multi-century Reconstruction from the Geochemistry of Long-lived Corals The western Pacific warm pool provides a major source of water vapor and energy to the global atmosphere and is a "center of action" for the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system, whose signal permeates the global record of interannual climate variability. ENSO warm extremes originate from the region, and the western Pacific convection anomalies associated with ENSO propagate climate variability throughout the tropics and the world. This award supports a project that will reconstruct multi-century records of variability in the ocean/atmosphere of the western equatorial Pacific, using geochemical records from the skeletons of long-lived corals. The study will extend the limited record to ENSO to span the past few centuries along an equatorial transect from the region of the date line into the heart of the western Pacific warm pool. The resulting records will provide a new understanding of long-term temporal and spatial variability of ENSO and its relation to variations in the western Pacific warm pool and to external forcings, including the regional response to the Little Ice Age. The proposed paleoclimatic study will place the TOGA/COARE observations in a long-term perspective and delineating the range of natural variability that models must aim to simulate.