NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - Eastern Equatorial Pacific Radiolaria Data

Eight 150,000 year long records of sea surface temperatures combined with two additional records spanning 400,000 years constrain the spatial and temporal patterns of oceanographic change in the eastern equatorial Pacific and possible mechanisms of variability in the region. Empirical orthogonal function analysis shows two important modes of variability, one associated with the eastern boundary current and another associated with the North Equatorial Countercurrent. The two long time series located in the equatorial divergence and within the Peru Current have very different patterns of change. The spectrum for the time series from the Peru Current is dominated by orbital periods of 100, 41, and 23 kyr and is similar in variance distribution and phase to records from the Southern Ocean. In contrast, the equatorial divergence site has spectral concentrations at the orbital frequencies and also concentration of variance at the nonorbital 31,000 year period. The phase and amplitude spectra of these two sites support the importance of changes in eastern boundary advection and also document a nonlinear response of the equatorial Pacific to orbital changes. Finally, these data provide a new evaluation of the temperature change in the eastern equatorial Pacific during the last glacial maximum. Cooling in the Peru Current region is predicted to be about 4°C, and cooling in the equatorial divergence is estimated to be 3° to 5°C. The estimated cooling of the region is of the order of 2°C greater than the cooling predicted by Climate: Long-Range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction (CLIMAP).