Modeling Seasonal and Regional Patterns of Abrupt Climate Change

The aim of this research is to bring together high-resolution proxy records of abrupt climate change primarily from the Arctic and the northern hemisphere, but globally as well, with a sophisticated, global atmosphere-ocean climate model (ECBilt-CLIO) capable of reproducing abrupt climate changes, in order to improve our understanding of how such climate shifts are triggered, propagate, end, and are recorded in paleo-environmental archives. Specifically, this proposal seeks to address several aspects of abrupt climate change, including the synchroneity of changes in different regions of the northern hemisphere and the world, the variable amplitudes of the events, the differing sequence of climatic events going into and out of abrupt climate changes, the seasonality of the events, the role of variable arctic sea ice extents, and the influence of variable levels of solar insolation on the events.