Plenary Speaker - Jessica E. Tierney

PlenarySpeaker_Jessica

 

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Biography

Dr. Jessica Tierney is an Assistant Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA. She received a PhD. in Geology from Brown University and was a NOAA/UCAR Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research focuses on tropical climate dynamics and paleoclimate, as well as the application of stable isotopes and molecular proxies towards paleoclimatic reconstruction. For more information, visit http://www.whoi.edu/tierney/

Abstract: Indo-Pacific climate during the Common Era: New perspectives from land and sea

Climate variability in the Indian Ocean/Indo-Pacific Warm Pool - the deep convective core of tropical atmospheric circulation exerts enormous influence on patterns of rainfall in Indian Ocean Rim countries. While mechanisms driving interannual variability e.g., El Niño are relatively well-understood, those responsible for lower-frequency modulations of rainfall are not, in part because they cannot be studied using the instrumental record alone. Paleoclimate evidence of recent climatic change extends the instrumental record and thus allows for study of these important lower-frequency climate dynamics. However, a clear picture of Indo-Pacific climate during the Common Era is only just now emerging from still-sparse proxy networks. 

This talk will present several new proxy syntheses of last millennium Indo-Pacific climate, including 1) a synthesis of hydroclimate in coastal East Africa and 2) a synthesis of sea-surface temperatures in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans, compiled as part of the PAGES Ocean2K project, a subsidiary of the global PAGES2K effort. Both products yield fundamental insights into the agency of the Indian vs. Pacific ocean in driving regional decadal-to-centennial scale rainfall, improving our knowledge of internal variability in the tropical climate system as well as its response to external forcings.