Climate Change Detection and Attribution Using Tree Rings

This seminar will be presented in person only; there will be no live remote viewing available. Please join us in Bren Hall 1414. 

ABSTRACT

Understanding the drivers of climate change, and distinguishing human influence from natural variability, is essential for decision-making, policy, and environmental management. To understand how and why the climate is changing, we must distinguish externally forced trends from the backdrop of internal climate variability. This talk presents how tree-ring paleoclimate data can improve our ability to detect and attribute climate change, particularly when short observational records and high natural variability increase uncertainty in future projections. Using three case studies, I show how using both tree-ring records and climate general circulation models can improve our understanding of climate change detection and attribution. In high-latitude northwest North America, high-resolution cellular-scale measurements of tree-ring data improve proxy-model agreement for long-term temperature variability, reducing the risk of false positives in attributing trends to anthropogenic forcing. I also demonstrate how internal variability, along with the biological nature of tree-ring data, can complicate the interpretation of post-volcanic eruption cooling in the paleoclimate record. Finally, I will introduce recent work using sub-seasonal tree-ring data to reconstruct extreme precipitation and atmospheric river activity in Southern California. These reconstructions will be compared to multi-model large ensembles to evaluate how well climate models represent the frequency and variability of extreme precipitation events. Together, these examples highlight how high-resolution tree-ring data can help resolve proxy–model discrepancies, strengthening our ability to disentangle the effects of external forcing on the climate system.

BIO

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and hold an NSF Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. I recently completed my PhD in the Past Landscapes Lab at the University of Arizona in the School of Geography and Development and the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. My research focuses on climate variability, extreme events, and the climatic effects associated with large volcanic eruptions. I use a wide range of data and tools (tree rings, historical observations, climate model simulations, and proxy systems modeling to name a few) and specialize in high-resolution and multivariate analyses from quantitative wood anatomy.