Natural Spatiotemporal Variability of Climate over the Western United States in the Last Holocene

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This award is to support research that will develop a network of tree-ring records covering the past 3,000 years from the western United States. These data will be used to understand the temporal and geographic variability of Holocene climate in western North America. Field work will be undertaken to obtain tree-ring records of appropriate length from regions currently lacking high resolution time series. Existing tree-ring archives will be carefully analyzed to select the best 3000+ year records of climate. These records will be integrated into a network with sufficient geographic coverage to be useful for ocean-atmosphere modeling studies. The resulting network of records will be used to produce a variety of climate reconstructions ranging from long regional reconstructions to synoptic reconstructions of the western United States. The broader impacts of this proposed research center on the development of a network of high resolution climate records from the western United States that can be used to fully explore the range and frequency of climate change. This tool is presently not available and will have a wide range of applications for paleoclimatology, oceanography and other subdisciplines of climate change.