CAREER: Decadal Variability in the Tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans -An Interdisciplinary Pathway for Global Change Education and Research

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

The teaching and research program for this CAREER award is a continuum from basic education through leading-edge research, involving students at every step. A new educational initiative aims to expand the pipeline of talented students entering the field by developing a new web-based educational resource for high-school teaching of global change science and linking secondary school classrooms with university researchers. Research on decadal climate variability will incorporate undergraduate and graduate participation. Classroom teaching will cover diverse aspects of global change at all levels (from introductory undergraduate through advanced graduate seminars) with a multidisciplinary approach. The research component aims to characterize decadal variability in the tropical Indian and Pacific Ocean, building on new results that indicate a dominant and far-reaching role for the tropical Pacific even at this time scale. Using multiple geochemical tracers in long-lived coral skeletons, this project will expand the record of variability in the central Pacific and western Indian Oceans. Coral records from the central Pacific clearly record the multiple time scales of variability in this region: they offer reconstructions of ENSO that are comparable in quality to instrumental data, and they reveal decadal variability that is coherent with other records in the tropics. This project will expand on previous work by recovering longer cores from this key region and by developing reconstructions from multiple tracers that allow the separation of salinity (rainfall) and temperature variance. Additional coring in the western Indian Ocean will extend the record of variance in that region both spatially and temporally, allowing characterization of the extent to which regional variance is driven by Pacific versus more regional (e.g. monsoonal) processes.