Funding is provided to develop a multi-millennial tree-ring record of past climate and glacier activity over the last 10,000 years for the North Pacific Rim and northern North America by using existing tree-ring samples and new samples from Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The scientific goal is to develop a greater understanding of North Pacific climate variability to aid efforts in predicting western North American climate on annual to multi-decadal time scales.
The researchers will pursue a series of hypotheses to guide their research, namely: 1) the recent period of anthropogenic change has been unique relative to the Holocene North Pacific thermal history of the past several millennia; 2) multi-decadal and longer-term North Pacific climate variability does not reflect a true dynamical mode, but instead results from the interaction of different modes of variation (e.g. ~20 and 50 year cycles) that can combine to produce such shifts; 3) both internal (North Pacific) and external (e.g. solar) forcings have significantly impacted North Pacific climate over the past several millennia; 4) there is a millennial-scale rhythm to North Pacific ocean-atmosphere climate variability; and 5) robust linkages exist between North Pacific and tropical climate with regards to regime shifts and other features, reflecting coupled atmosphere-ocean modes of variability.
The broader impacts involve supporting undergraduate and graduate students as well as providing new data on a region considered to be a bellwether of changing climate.
