Speleothems: A New Proxy Record of Individual Hurricanes and Tropical Storm events

University Of New Hampshire, Durham NH

Investigators

Abstract

This award is for a study to provide the first "snapshot" of past tropical cyclone activity during the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period. To accomplish this goal, the investigators will collect several speleothems from a site in Jamaica. They will then perform 210Pb dating to supplement annual band counting and unambiguously determine the year of deposition of each speleothem layer. Stable isotopic analyses will be conducted at weekly intervals (20 micron resolution, sufficient resolution for detecting individual storms) on the selected speleothem for three decades in the late 20th century. The speleothem record of tropical cyclone events thus generated will be calibrated and assessed by comparison to the historical storm record for that location. Finally, the investigators will apply the proxy method to detect tropical storms and hurricanes during the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period (using the same speleothem), and thus determine the relation between climate (i.e. sea surface temperature) and storm frequency.