P2C2: Mechanistic Interpretation of the Spatial Signatures of Mid-Holocene Precipitation over South America and the Atlantic

总体而言，该项目旨在更好地了解代用指标在多大程度上可以用来推断过去气候变率的特征，特别是代用指标在热带南美洲/大西洋地区全新世中期降水变化方面的效果如何。研究将集中在三个方面：(1)量化中全新世与前工业化时期降水空间分布的变化；（ii）识别模式模拟的全新世中期南美/大西洋地区水文气候变率的主要驱动因素；（iii）研究导致中全新世降水变化特征的原因和反馈过程，并评估为什么当代古气候模式的集合在解释古气候代用物所需的尺度上经常出现重大分歧。本科生和博士后研究员将得到支持。古气候模式模拟的结果将提供给本科生和研究生。

This project seeks to better understand, generally, the extent to which proxies can be used to infer signatures of past climate variability and, specifically, how well proxies do with mid-Holocene precipitation variation over the tropical South America/Atlantic region. The research will focus on three activities: (i) quantifying changes in the spatial distribution of precipitation between mid-Holocene and preindustrial conditions; (ii) identifying the principal drivers of South America/Atlantic region hydroclimatic variability in the mid-Holocene as simulated by models; and (iii) examining the causal agents and feedback processes responsible for the signatures of mid-Holocene precipitation change and evaluate why the ensemble of current generation paleoclimate models often diverge substantially at the scales required to interpret paleoclimate proxies.Undergraduate students and a postdoctoral researcher will be supported. Output from the paleoclimate model simulations will be made accessible and incorporated into undergraduate and graduate classes.