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温度和降水等。虽然气候通常看起来是随机和不可预测的，但气候科学的最新进展指出，有规律发生的模式给气候系统带来了一些秩序。例如，El Niño是地球气候最著名的“自然模式”。这种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；对于任何给定的“事件”，每个模式都有一个典型的生命周期。气候模型试图预测这些模式和典型的生命周期。可靠的气候模式需要对过去不同环境条件的长期高分辨率记录。这些数据可用于气候预报和估计人类对气候的影响。然而，环境变量的仪器记录是有限的。对于中纬度和高纬度海洋尤其如此，在这些地区，年际和季节海洋气候变率的多世纪重建很少。来自这些地区的高分辨率古气候数据对于全球气候模式的输入是必不可少的，对于区分自然和人为引起的气候变率是必要的。因此，我的研究旨在利用地质气候档案生成和解释多世纪气候记录。本提案将重点从珊瑚红藻中提取气候信息。生活在浅海中的珊瑚红藻非常适合作为热带以外过去气候的记录者，因为它们(1)广泛分布在温带海洋中，(2)寿命长，(3)在钙化的骨骼中显示出年增长增量（类似于树木的年轮）。在接下来的五年里，我计划从白令海和西北大西洋进行多世纪气候重建，这两个关键地区的气候和生态系统变化最近对渔业产量产生了巨大影响。气候重建预计将提供有关过去气候变率、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.