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Tropical Pacific – mid-latitude teleconnections in medieval times

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Abstract

Terrestrial and marine late Holocene proxy records from the western and central US suggest that climate between approximately 500 and 1350 a.d. was marked by generally arid conditions with episodes of severe centennial-scale drought, elevated incidence of wild fire, cool sea surface temperatures (SSTs) along the California coast, and dune mobilization in the western plains. This Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) was followed by wetter conditions and warming coastal SSTs during the transition into the “Little Ice Age” (LIA). Proxy records from the tropical Pacific Ocean show contemporaneous changes indicating cool central and eastern tropical Pacific SSTs during the MCA, with warmer than modern temperatures in the western equatorial Pacific. This pattern of mid-latitude and tropical climate conditions is consistent with the hypothesis that the dry MCA in the western US resulted (at least in part) from tropically forced changes in winter NH circulation patterns like those associated with modern La Niña episodes. We examine this hypothesis, and present other analyses showing that the imprint of MCA climate change appears in proxy records from widely distributed regions around the planet, and in many cases is consistent with a cool medieval tropical Pacific. One example, explored with numerical model results, is the suggestion of increased westerlies and warmer winter temperatures over northern Europe during medieval times. An analog technique for the combined use of proxy records and model results, Proxy Surrogate Reconstruction (PSR), is introduced.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hydrologic Research Center, 12780 High Bluff Drive, Suite 250, San Diego, CA, 92130-2069, USA

    Nicholas E. Graham

  2. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Nicholas E. Graham

  3. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Malcolm K. Hughes

  4. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Caspar M. Ammann

  5. Georgia Technical Institute, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Kim M. Cobb

  6. NOAA Climate Diagnostics Center, Boulder, CO, USA

    Martin P. Hoerling & Taiyi Xu

  7. University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

    Douglas J. Kennett

  8. University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    James P. Kennett

  9. Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Mainz, Germany

    Bert Rein

  10. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Lowell Stott

  11. University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

    Peter E. Wigand

  12. California State University, Bakersfield, CA, USA

    Peter E. Wigand

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  1. Nicholas E. Graham
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Correspondence to Nicholas E. Graham.

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Graham, N.E., Hughes, M.K., Ammann, C.M. et al. Tropical Pacific – mid-latitude teleconnections in medieval times. Climatic Change 83, 241–285 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-007-9239-2

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