ORCID

0000-0003-3563-2019 (Wallace)

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.1029/2024PA004870

Publication Title

Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology

Volume

39

Issue

9

Pages

e2024PA004870 (1-19)

Abstract

The short and biased observational record of tropical cyclones (TCs) limits scientific understanding of how these destructive storms respond to climate forcing. Paleohurricane records use natural archives (tree rings, coarse-grained sediment) to reconstruct TC properties (frequency and intensity of rainfall, wind) over the past few hundreds to thousands of years. However, different sensitivities and sampling biases in the various paleohurricane proxies restrict our ability to compile these records into regional or basin-scale TC estimates. Here we test how well pseudo tree-ring records of paleohurricanes capture TC rainfall and occurrence. Using a large set of statistically downscaled storms forced with the Max Planck Institute (MPI-ESM-P) model as boundary conditions for the past millennium, we generate a 1000-member ensemble of pseudo tree-ring records of latewood width from southern Mississippi using a Poisson process-based random draw. Pseudo records convert synthetic TC rainfall into latewood width using a previously published statistical calibration and seasonal sensitivity. We show that fourth quantile thresholds applied to pseudo latewood data successfully identify years with TC strikes. Comparing pseudo tree-ring records with pseudo sediment records from the Gulf Coast indicates promise in combining proxies sensitive to TC rainfall with proxies sensitive to storm overwash. Sediment records that are sensitive to lower intensity storms (≥Saffir Simpson Category 1) are more compatible with tree-ring records, suggesting a need for more of these low intensity threshold records in the Gulf to facilitate future multi-proxy efforts to reconstruct past TC properties.

Rights

© 2024 The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Data Availability

Article states: "The synthetic storm data and MATLAB scripts for processing is available on Zenodo (Wallace et al, 2024)."

Original Publication Citation

Wallace, E. J., Dee, S., Bregy, J., & Emanuel, K. A. (2024). A proxy system modeling approach to combining tree-ring and sediment-based paleotempestological records. Paleooceanography and Paleoclimatology, 39(9), 1-19, Article e2024PA004870. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024PA004870

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