Assessing Wind-driven Circulation Variability in the Subtropical N. Atlantic Using an Array of Archived Radiocarbon Records

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).In the North Atlantic Ocean, poleward transport of equatorial heat is facilitated by both the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and the Subtropical Cells (STCs). Changes in the transport balance of these two mechanisms have been suggested by the short instrumental record of oceanographic data, but questions about whether these changes reflect cycles or trends in the climate system remain unaddressed by the short length of these records. This research analyzes radiocarbon (14C) records stored in the skeletons of corals and sclerosponges from a variety of locations across the tropical Atlantic to constrain changes in the STCs over the past century and beyond. The locations from which these skeletal archives have been taken enable a unique opportunity for geochemical paleoceanographic data, rich in temporal extent but spatially sparse, to aid in the interpretation of the short instrumental record. Results from this study will be of interest not only to paleo-oceanographers and paleoclimatologists, but also to climate modelers who may aim to use numeric simulations to spatially interpolate the records resulting from this project. This award supports a graduate research assistant and an early career PI.