A Big Data approach to reconstruct Australia’s hydroclimate (Neogene - Quaternary)

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Today, Australia experiences different climate regimes, being under the tropical climate belt in the north, the subtropical climate belt (including deserts and grasslands) in the centre, and the temperate Mediterranean-style climate belt in the south. Therewith, Australian climate is underpinned by the Hadley and Ferrel atmospheric cells. Satellite observations and climate models suggest that the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is currently narrowing and strengthening, with no reversal of this trend projected in the near future (Byrne et al., 2018). More extensive changes in latitudinal extent and intensity of these atmospheric cells may have existed on timescales beyond the instrumental record, but the lack of high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions (in space and time) hampers the assessment of Australian climate sensitivity to a variety of forcings. In this proposal, the ambition is to expand the range of the observational record with geological sedimentary sequences obtained through ocean drilling. My starting point is based on the fact that rainfall patterns in Australia experienced major regime shifts on million-year timescales, throughout the Neogene. However, a spatiotemporal overview is still lacking. I propose to fill this need by a continent-scale approach, generating paleoclimate time-slice maps based on ocean-drilling proxy data of the last 23 Myr. Sequencing those maps results in a paleoclimate time-lapse, visualizing hydroclimate and sea surface temperature (SST) change through space and time. This Big Data approach exploits the potential to valorise existing data in ways we have not before.