Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 113, Issue 12, Pages 3169-3174Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1519566113
Keywords
Caribbean; tropical cyclone; Maunder Minimum; dendrochronology; documentary data
Categories
Funding
- Office of Research from the University of Southern Mississippi
- National Science Foundation [1002479, 0538420]
- United States Fish and Wildlife Service
- University of Arizona Agnese N. Haury Visiting Fellowship
- Marie Sklodowska Curie Innovative Training Networks Fellowship (ForSEAdiscovery project) [PITN-2013-GA-607545]
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci [1002479] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Graduate Education
- Direct For Education and Human Resources [0538420] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Assessing the impact of future climate change on North Atlantic tropical cyclone (TC) activity is of crucial societal importance, but the limited quantity and quality of observational records interferes with the skill of future TC projections. In particular, North Atlantic TC response to radiative forcing is poorly understood and creates the dominant source of uncertainty for twenty-first-century projections. Here, we study TC variability in the Caribbean during the Maunder Minimum (MM; 1645-1715 CE), a period defined by the most severe reduction in solar irradiance in documented history (1610-present). For this purpose, we combine a documentary time series of Spanish shipwrecks in the Caribbean (1495-1825 CE) with a tree-growth suppression chronology from the Florida Keys (1707-2009 CE). We find a 75% reduction in decadal-scale Caribbean TC activity during the MM, which suggests modulation of the influence of reduced solar irradiance by the cumulative effect of cool North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, El Nino-like conditions, and a negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation. Our results emphasize the need to enhance our understanding of the response of these oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns to radiative forcing and climate change to improve the skill of future TC projections.
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