Abstract ATM-9417160 Peteet, Dorothy Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Title: High-Resolution Vegetation and Climate Records from the U.S. Southeast; Glacial to Holocene Changes This award supports a project designed to establish the patterns of vegetation change across the U.S. southeast. The timing, magnitude and geographical extent of the vegetation response, in conjunction with ice and ocean records, will help link mid-latitude and high- latitude climate regimes. Improved chronological control on a variety of paleoclimate records has focused attention on the rapidity with which climate may change. This proposal will result in high-resolution paleovegetation records from Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, encompassing an interval from approximately 18,000 to 9000 yrs BP. These records, combined with those existing, will reveal if vegetation responds unidirectionally across the region. Climate forcings will be identified and their potential to influence the southeastern region will be evaluated with general circulation model (GCM) simulations. The GCM simulations will evaluate the model's sensitivity to variations in solar insolation, ice sheet extent and height, and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the North Atlantic Ocean. Data-model comparisons will point to future directions of observational and model research.
