Strontium contents of a Porites coral from Xisha Island, South China Sea: A proxy for sea‐surface temperature of the 20th century

Abstract

[1] A Porites coral collected from Xisha Island, South China Sea, represents a skeleton secreted in the period from 1906 to 1994. The Sr contents of the coral vary linearly with the instrument-measured sea-surface temperature (SST), giving a Sr thermometer: SST = À1.9658 Â Sr + 193.26. The reconstructed SST data show that the late 20th century was warmer (about 1°C) than the early 20th century and that two cooling (1915/1916 and 1947/1948) and three warming (1935/1936, 1960/1961, and 1976/1977) shifts occurred in the century. The temperature shifts are more pronounced for winters, implying a close effect of the west Pacific warm pool and Asian monsoon and suggesting that the former is a primary force controlling the climatic system of the region. Results of this study and previously published data indicate a close link of temperature shifts between the boreal summer and the austral winter or the boreal winter and the austral summer. The annual SST anomalies in the South China Sea and the South Pacific reveal the existence of harmonic but opposite SST variations between the two regions. On the decadal scale the comparative annual SST anomalies for the South China Sea and for the equatorial west Pacific show a similarity in temperature variations, implying that the South China Sea climate is coherent with climatic regime of the tropical west Pacific.

Variation of initial 230Th/232Th and limits of high precision U–Th dating of shallow-water corals

“…Since the 1990s, weekly to monthly resolution coral climate records over decadal, centennial, or millennial time scales have been published (e.g., Gagan and Chivas, 1995;Crowley et al, 1997;Evans et al, 1998;Linsley et al, 2000;Urban et al, 2000;Hendy et al, 2002;Cobb et al, 2003a;McCulloch et al, 2003;Kilbourne et al, 2004;Sun et al, 2004;Nyberg et al, 2007). For centuries-old modern and young fossil corals, age uncertainties of ±1-5 yrs limit our ability to accurately determine the timing of climatic events and the precisely cross-correlate coral records to other high resolution proxy records.…”

Evaluation of annual resolution coral geochemical records as climate proxies in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia

“…To acquire seasonal to monthly climatic information, most studies sample coral skeletons at very high-resolution intervals (ca. 1 mm or less; e.g., McCulloch et al 1994;Alibert and McCulloch 1997;Gagan et al 1998;McCulloch et al 1999;Sun et al 2004;Wei et al 2007;Deng et al 2009;Duprey et al 2012;DeLong et al 2013). However, high-resolution sampling requires a considerable number of subsamples for analysis, which makes coral-based climate reconstructions time consuming, labor intensive, and expensive.…”

The coral grayness in northern South China Sea and its description of interdecadal variation of precipitation in south China

“…To make up for the deficiency, other alternative data, such as tree rings and coral records, are used to study the climate change across the world. Boiseau and Ghil [3] studied the interdecadal climate change as described by the series of δ 13 C and δ 18 O records in coral. Cobb et al [4] probed into the relationship between the coral in the tropical central Pacific and interdecadal climate change over the equatorial Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean.…”