Coralline red algae as recorders of mid- and higher-latitute paleoclimates

气候被定义为天气的统计数据，通常被量化为月平均气温和降雨量。虽然气候往往看起来是随机和不可预测的，但气候科学的最新进展表明，有规律地出现的模式会给气候系统带来一些秩序。例如，厄尔尼诺现象是地球气候最著名的“自然模式”。这种气候模式和其他气候模式在风、气温和降水的季节性变化模式中具有特征特征；每种模式还具有任何给定“事件”的典型生命周期。气候模型试图预测这些模式和典型的生命周期。可靠的气候模型需要不同环境下对过去环境条件的长期和高分辨率记录。这样的数据可以进行气候预测，并估计人类对气候的影响。然而，环境变量的工具记录是有限的。对于中纬度和高纬度海洋尤其如此，那里很少对海洋气候年内和季节变化进行多中心重建。来自这些区域的高分辨率古气候数据对于全球气候模型的投入至关重要，对于区分自然和人为造成的气候变异性也是必要的。因此，我的研究目的是利用地质气候档案生成和解释多个国家的气候记录。这项提议将重点放在从珊瑚红藻中提取气候信息。珊瑚红藻生活在浅海，非常适合作为热带以外过去气候的记录器，因为它们(1)广泛分布于温带外海洋，(2)寿命长，(3)在钙化的骨骼中显示年生长增量(类似于树轮)。在接下来的五年里，我计划从白令海和西北大西洋产生多中心的气候重建，这两个关键地区对气候和生态系统的变化缺乏了解，最近对渔业产量产生了戏剧性的影响。气候重建预计将提供有关过去气候变化、气候振荡强度和频率的信息，并有助于预测未来的气候演变。

Climate is defined as the statistics of weather, and is often quantified for things like monthly averaged temperature and precipitation. While climate has often seemed random and unpredictable, recent advances in climate science point to regularly occurring patterns that impose some order on the climate system. The El Niño, for instance, is the best known "natural pattern" of Earth's climate. This and other climate patterns have characteristic signatures in seasonally changing patterns of wind, air temperature, and precipitation; each pattern also has a typical life time for any given "event". Climate models attempt to predict these patterns and typical life times. Reliable climate models require long-term and high-resolution records of past environmental conditions from different settings. Such data can enable climate forecasts and estimate the human impact on climate. However, instrumental records of environmental variables are limited. This is especially true for mid- and higher latitude oceans, where multicentury reconstructions of intraannual and seasonal marine climate variability are scarce. High-resolution paleoclimate data from these regions are essential as input for global climate models, and necessary in order to distinguish natural and anthropogenically induced climate variability. My research is therefore aimed at generating and interpreting multicentury climate records using geologic climate archives. This proposal will focus on the extraction of climate information from coralline red algae. Coralline red algae, which live in shallow seas, are well suited as recorders of past climates outside the tropics because they (1) are widely distributed in extratropical oceans, (2) are long-lived, and (3) display annual growth increments (similar to tree rings) in a calcified skeleton. Over the next five years I plan to generate multicentury climate reconstructions from the Bering Sea and Northwestern Atlantic- two key regions where poorly understood climate and ecosystem changes have recently had a dramatic impact on fishery yields. The climate reconstructions are expected to yield information on past climate variability, strength and frequency of climate oscillations, and aid in predicting future climate evolution.