The prospect of significant changes in global climatic patterns has encouraged scientists to evaluate the character of past changes. Not only have different climatic regimes produced significant shifts in temperature and precipitation, they also have altered the timing and location of storms and other major meteorologic events. If the world's climate is changing again, we can expect the patterns of cataclysmic events to change; retrospectively, we should be able to trace past climatic changes in the historical and paleoecological records of major storms. This project will analyze stratigraphic records from a freshwater lake along the Alabama coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Radiographic methods will be used to date sediments and pollen will be analyzed to identify the impacts of Hurricane Frederick in 1979 on lake sediments; the resultant patterns then will be used to identify the timing and impacts of earlier hurricanes affecting the area. This project will serve as a pilot effort to refine and calibrate a new technique for determining the timing and nature of calamitous storms. Development of this technique will clarify the potential for the use of limnological and sedimentological data in the reconstruction of environmental records, which are crucial for effective testing of models of global climatic change. The project also will provide significant new data on the environmental history of this climatically active region of the U.S.
