Research

South American Paleoclimate Research PIRE-CREATE

PIRE - CREATE is an international collaboration that involves six institutions and 18 investigators from the United States (University at Albany - State University of New York & Columbia University), University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and IANIGLA in Argentina. The goal of this project is to advance paleoclimate research over the Americas to the point where it can transform the way we inform policy- and decision-making at a trans-national level about the risks of climate change and place future projections in a broad historical context. The project is co-funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Sao Paulo State Research Agency (FAPESP). Learn more.

Andean Climate Change Interamerican Observatory Network (ACCION)

The retreat of glaciers and decreased water availability in paramo environments, coupled with warmer temperatures and enhanced probabilities of drought occurrence, suggests the potential for a severe future water crisis in the tropical Andes. As a response to these documented effects, and to increase the capacity in the Andean region to deal with this crisis in an anticipatory manner, with funding from the US State Department we created the Andean Climate Change Interamerican Observatory Network (ACCIÓN). The goal of this program is to enhance capacity building at both the scientific and the communications levels in four target countries (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru & Chile) so as to catalyze networking and strengthen simultaneously local research institutions and policy making inthese countries. Learn More.

Andean Climate Change: Observations, Research & Discovery (ACCORD)

The goal of the ACCORD project is to build the first multidisciplinary network of networks focused on climate change across the Andes, by taking advantage of the multidisciplinary expertise of the 10 largest international networks to produce scientific breakthroughs that have so far been elusive due to the lack of interdisciplinary and international cooperation. The project is funded by the NSF AccelNet program.
ACCORD will provide a new Andean climate database, shared on an accessible platform, improve our understanding of Andean mountain circulation, analyze how the intensity and frequency of extreme events (droughts, storms) will change, and document how climate change will affect glaciers, snow cover and water availability going forward. Our results will be displayed using advanced visualization tools, making them easy to understand for policy-makers and the public at large. Many of our results will be based on new, high-resolution model simulations that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of Andean climate change. ACCORD will also contribute to training the next generation of US-based scientists that are capable of addressing scientific grand challenges, by involving students and early career scientists in all aspects of the project. They will be exposed to interdisciplinary research abroad, help organize an international online seminar series, and participate in international summer schools and a high-resolution climate modeling workshop. We also plan to inform policy- and decision-makers, government agencies, stakeholders such as water managers, and the broader public about our research advances, by translating our model simulations into interactive online visualization tools. Check out our AccelNet-ACCORD Youtube video.

Elevation-dependent Warming (EDW)

Mountains are often projected to experience stronger warming than their surrounding lowlands, a phenomenon known as elevation-dependent warming (EDW), which can threaten high-altitude ecosystems and lead to accelerated glacier retreat. We have investigated both the mechanisms and the impacts associated with EDW in the tropical Andes using observations and regional climate models for over 20 years, dating back to early work by Vuille and Bradley (2000). Learn More.

Lascar eruption 1993 seen from El Laco Mining Camp

Volcanic impacts on climate

Future large tropical volcanic eruptions will affect climate globally, inducing changes that are superimposed on anthropogenic climate change. Understanding how volcanic eruptions affect global climate is therefore critically important. In our research on volcanic impacts on climate we rely primarily on modeling efforts focused on the Last Millennium to investigate how volcanic eruptions affected climate worldwide. Learn more.

Tropical glacier-climate interactions

Glaciers are rapidly retreating along the entire tropical Andes. Our research shows this glacier retreat is closely related to the observed increase in high-elevation, surface air temperature in the region. While interannual variations in mass balance are tied to the El Nino- Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, the long-term trend is driven by increased atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Learn More.

South American Monsoon reconstruction with paleo-data assimilation

South American summer monsoon (SASM) precipitation is critically important for environmental services that sustain socioeconomic activities, but future changes in monsoon rainfall remain highly uncertain. While the region’s paleoclimatic network has been steadily improving, so far the data has not been harnessed in a quantitative way that would allow putting current and future projected changes in a long-term context. In this project we are developing an isotope-enabled data assimilation (DA) product for South America, covering the Last Millennium (LM). By creating such an isotope-enabled reconstruction, we will be able to diagnose changes in isotopic composition and hydroclimate across the region within a framework that is dynamically and physically consistent. We are taking advantage of unique access to the two largest tree-ring and speleothem archives in South America with an unrivaled number of new, unpublished records. Our approach will fill a big data void over tropical South America, as existing climate field reconstructions have focused only on mid- and high-latitudes and it will add a new dimensionality of atmospheric dynamics and stable water isotopologues to these reconstructions. Learn more.