ITR: Development of an enhanced computer-assisted analysis system for earth science investigation of laminated sediments and tree rings

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0219075OverpeckNatural archives with year-by-year resolution (isannual resolution proxieslo), such as tree-rings, varved sediments, corals, mollusks, and speleothems, are becoming increasingly critical for understanding the nature of past environmental variability, and how it may change in the future. The most obvious use of these archives is in understanding the patterns and causes of natural interannual to century-scale climate variability, and how humans may be altering this variability. They are also central, however, to an increasingly broad range of Earth Science applications, including documenting paleoseismicity, calibrating the radiocarbon time scale, investigating hydrologic variability, and understanding paleoecosystem dynamics. Their capability to provide the absolute time scale needed to understand these dynamics on many societally-relevant time scales is particularly important. At present, extracting information from these sources is extraordinarily labor-intensive, resulting in undesirable limitations on temporal resolution and replication that result in excessive uncertainties concerning the environmental signals of interest. This applies even when sophisticated detectors are used to make basic measurements, since great care must be taken in stringing series of measurements together into very long time series whilst retaining all information that might turn out to be useful later in the analysis. Existing image-analysis software alone cannot solve this problem. The labor-intensive analysis that these records require has created a strong incentive to develop instrumentation that can be used to process samples more efficiently, and with more interpretive power than is available from off-the- shelf image processing software.This Information Technology Research Small Grants Program (ITR) award will support the development of software for automated counting of annually laminated climate change proxies (tree rings and varves). The developments are based on a prototype computer-assisted dendrochronology workstation and associated control and image analysis software (TREES v. 1) that was previously funded to co-PI Schowengerdt by NSF's Anthropology program (BCS-9601867). This award will support the creation of TREES v.2, a Linux-based PC version of TREES v.1, which was written exclusively for the SUN platform, and VARVES v.1, also Linux-based software designed to automate counting of laminated lake and marine sediments. ***