Decadal change of the south Atlantic ocean Angola–Benguela frontal zone since 1980

Climate Dynamics - High-resolution simulations with a regional atmospheric model coupled to an intermediate-level mixed layer ocean model along with multiple atmospheric and oceanic reanalyses are...     

New insights on Late Quaternary Asian palaeomonsoon variability and the timing of the Last Glacial Maximum in southwestern China

A ～6.35 m core (06SD) was retrieved from Lake Shudu, Yunnan Province, China. The sediments spanning the period ～22.6–10.5 kcal. yr BP (6.35–1.44 m) were analysed using a combination of variables including pollen, charcoal, particle size, magnetic susceptibility and loss-on-ignition. The resulting palaeorecord provides a high-resolution reconstruction of Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene climatic and environmental changes in southwestern China. Our findings indicate that from c. 22.6 to 17.7 kcal. yr BP, vegetation assemblages were primarily aligned to sparse xerophytic grassland/tundra or cold-tolerant boreal Pinus forest, indicating that climatic conditions in southwestern China were cold and dry. However, from c. 17.7 to 17.4 kcal. yr BP, the Lake Shudu record is punctuated by marked environmental changes. These include the establishment of denser vegetation cover, a marked expansion of boreal Pinus forest and enhanced hydrological activity in the catchment over centennial timescales, perhaps suggesting that stepwise variations in the Asian Monsoon were triggering fundamental environmental changes over sub-millennial timescales. Thereafter, the pollen record captures a period of environmental instability reflected in fluctuations across all of the variables, which persists until c. 17.1 kcal. yr BP. After c. 17.1 kcal. yr BP, the expansion of steppe vegetation cover and cold–cool mixed forest consisting of mesophilous vegetation such as Tsuga and Picea, thermophilous trees including Ulmus and deciduous Quercus inferred from the Lake Shudu pollen record point to the establishment of warmer, wetter and perhaps more seasonal conditions associated with a strengthening Asian Summer Monsoon during the shift from Pleistocene to Holocene climatic conditions.     

Estimating groundwater discharge to rivers from river chemistry surveys

Environmental tracer methods have been used to quantify groundwater discharge to rivers for the past few decades. A number of different tracers have been used in these studies, including individual ion concentrations, electrical conductivity, stable isotopes ²H and ¹⁸O, and the dissolved gases helium, chlorofluorocarbons and radon. This paper discusses the assumptions of the method, as well as its resolution and accuracy. The method will be most accurate when the tracer concentration in groundwater is very distinct from that in the river. On the basis of typical parameters, groundwater inflow rates as low as 5 mm/day can usually be estimated with electrical conductivity and ion tracers. A lower limit of resolution of approximately 2 mm/day is usually possible with radon, principally because the ratio of the river concentration to the groundwater concentration will be higher. However, hyporheic exchange can also contribute radon to the river. Where this process is significant, it is more difficult to estimate groundwater inflow from radon activities in the river, thus reducing the accuracy of the method. For CFCs, the lower limit of resolution is approximately 30 mm/day. Helium has not been widely used but can potentially be very accurate if the groundwater is old. The method assumes steady‐state conditions and so can only be applied when river flows are stable. Sampling resolution is also particularly important for dissolved gases, and uncertainty in where groundwater inflow occurs between sampling points can cause large uncertainty in inflow rates if the distance between sample locations is large. Poor mixing of solutes within the river can limit the method if the river is wide and shallow. When correctly applied, however, the environmental tracer method is able to provide robust estimates of groundwater discharge at a scale and accuracy that is not possible with most other methods. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Paleoclimate histories improve access and sustainability in index insurance programs

Proxy-based climate reconstructions can extend instrumental records by hundreds of years, providing a wealth of climate information at high temporal resolution. To date, however, their usefulness for informing climate risk and variability in policy and social applications has been understudied. Here, we apply tree-ring based reconstructions of drought for the last 700 years in a climate index insurance framework to show that additional information from long climate reconstructions significantly improves our understanding of the underlying climate distributions and variability. We further show that this added information can be used to better characterize risk to insurance providers, in many cases providing meaningful reductions in long-term contract costs to farmers in stand-alone policies. The impact of uncertainty on insurance premiums can also be reduced when insurers diversify portfolios, and the availability of long-term climate information from tree rings across a broad geographic range provides an opportunity to characterize spatial correlation in climate risk across geographic regions. Our results are robust to the range of climate variability experienced over the last 400 years and in model simulations of the twenty-first century, even within the context of changing baselines due to low frequency variability and secular climate trends. These results demonstrate the utility of longer-term climate histories in index insurance applications. Furthermore, they make the case from a climate-variability perspective for the continued importance of such approaches to improving the instrumental climate record, even into a non-stationary climate future.     

Problematic but promising ponds? Palaeoenvironmental evidence from the Norse Eastern Settlement of Greenland

Pollen‐ and related proxy‐based studies of human–environment interactions during the Norse and later periods within Greenland have primarily involved the investigation of peat, lake and soil deposits, all of which have taphonomic and sampling problems. Many small ponds exist, but they seem to have been relatively ignored in investigations of palaeoecologically based environmental history. To evaluate their usefulness for studies of ecologically related cultural history, especially where sites are in intimate association with the archaeology, a pond in the Norse Eastern Settlement has been examined to investigate three principal questions: (i) Does such a site contain a useful record of environmental history? (ii) Does it offer a record of sufficient resolution and sensitivity for the study of anthropogenic landscape impacts? (iii) Are there any apparent drawbacks to these sequences? Using data obtained from palynological, diatom, sedimentological and radiocarbon analyses, it is concluded that environmental data for each proxy – aside from ¹⁴C dating – are clearly capable of being explained in a reasonably straightforward and compatible manner and fulfil the hopes for the sampling medium. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.