The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) represents the largest source of year-to-year global climate variability. While Earth system models suggest a range of possible shifts in ENSO properties under continued greenhouse gas forcing, many centuries of preindustrial climate data are required to detect a potential shift in the properties of recent ENSO extremes. Here we reconstruct the strength of ENSO variations over the last 7,000 years with a new ensemble of fossil coral oxygen isotope records from the Line Islands, located in the central equatorial Pacific. The corals document a significant decrease in ENSO variance of~20% from 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, coinciding with changes in spring/fall precessional insolation. We find that ENSO variability over the last five decades is~25% stronger than during the preindustrial. Our results provide empirical support for recent climate model projections showing an intensification of ENSO extremes under greenhouse forcing.
Plain Language SummaryRecent modeling studies suggest that El Niño will intensify due to greenhouse warming. Here new coral reconstructions of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) record sustained, significant changes in ENSO variability over the last 7,000 years and imply that ENSO extremes of the last 50 years are significantly stronger than those of the preindustrial era in the central tropical Pacific. These records suggest that El Niño events already may be intensifying due to anthropogenic climate change.
We constructed differential equation models for the diurnal abundance and distribution of breeding glaucous-winged gulls (Larus glaucescens) as they moved among nesting and non-nesting habitat patches. We used time scale techniques to reduce the differential equations to algebraic equations and connected the models to field data. The models explained the data as a function of abiotic environmental variables with R(2 )=0.57. A primary goal of this study is to demonstrate the utility of a methodology that can be used by ecologists and wildlife managers to understand and predict daily activity patterns in breeding seabirds.
Abstract. The response of the hydrological cycle to anthropogenic climate
change, especially across the tropical oceans, remains poorly understood due to the scarcity of long instrumental temperature and hydrological records. Massive shallow-water corals are ideally suited to reconstructing past oceanic variability as they are widely distributed across the tropics,
rapidly deposit calcium carbonate skeletons that continuously record ambient environmental conditions, and can be sampled at monthly to annual
resolution. Climate reconstructions based on corals primarily use the stable oxygen isotope composition (δ18O), which acts as a proxy for sea surface temperature (SST), and the oxygen isotope composition of
seawater (δ18Osw), a measure of hydrological variability. Increasingly, coral δ18O time series are paired with time series of strontium-to-calcium ratios (Sr/Ca), a proxy for SST, from the same coral to quantify temperature and δ18Osw variability
through time. To increase the utility of such reconstructions, we present
the CoralHydro2k database, a compilation of published, peer-reviewed coral Sr/Ca and δ18O records from the Common Era (CE). The database contains 54 paired Sr/Ca–δ18O records and 125 unpaired Sr/Ca or δ18O records, with 88 % of these records providing data coverage from 1800 CE to the present. A quality-controlled set of metadata with standardized vocabulary and units accompanies each record, informing the use
of the database. The CoralHydro2k database tracks large-scale temperature
and hydrological variability. As such, it is well-suited for investigations
of past climate variability, comparisons with climate model simulations
including isotope-enabled models, and application in paleodata-assimilation projects. The CoralHydro2k database is available in Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format with serializations in MATLAB, R, and Python and can be downloaded from the NOAA National Center for Environmental Information's Paleoclimate Data Archive at https://doi.org/10.25921/yp94-v135 (Walter et al., 2022).
# 2017-168
Historically in California volunteers have been incorporated into oiled wildlife response since the late 1990s. Prior to the Refugio Oil Spill (ROS) incident in May 2015, California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s (CDFW) Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR) had not managed Community Volunteers for non-wildlife activities, such as oiled shoreline cleanup. In the first days of the ROS event, members of the public who were interested in volunteering became frustrated, in part due to poor communication regarding volunteer use protocols and initial lack of an established volunteer management structure. Political expectations, in a highly urbanized and environmentally conscious community, also played a role. This paper will address, in part, how the public’s reaction to the ROS created an opportunity to test the Los Angeles / Long Beach Area Contingency Plan Non-Wildlife Volunteer Plan (LA/LB ACP - NWVP)1, and highlight lessons learned from the event and resulting changes to the volunteer program that have evolved.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.