Research project IGV| Storminess in the Eastern North Atlantic Region
Storminess in the Eastern North Atlantic Region & Scandinavian Storminess during the Holocene: Separating the Signals
These two partner projects work to understand past changes in storm frequency and intensity by examining the last 10 000 years of climate change using data from sand dunes and peatlands. In order to see how storm tracks have changed during time we need our records to cover a large area. This is why we are working on two transects (each funded by a separate agency): a western transect which runs from the Faroe Islands down through Scotland and Ireland and an eastern transect through Norway and Sweden.
Project description
Severe winter windstorms have become an increasingly common occurrence in the eastern North Atlantic over the last few decades. This increase in storminess is thought to be a result of global warming and is therefore expected to intensify in the future. There is however, low confidence in available projections and we are not able to accurately predict future storminess. This is significant considering that European storms have caused 85,000 deaths and an estimated €350 billion in damage over the last three decades.
Paleoarchives can improve these future predictions by allowing us to explore the mechanisms driving natural changes in storminess in the eastern North Atlantic on multi-decadal to millennial timescales as well as acquire data for climate model validation. There is however, relatively low spatial coverage of paleostorm records given the large geographic area involved. Dune activity records have long been central in paleostorm research, and recently, continuous peat paleostorm records have been introduced. It has been common practise to compile such paleostorm records over wide areas in order to find temporal periodicities in storminess and thereby, identify possible driving mechanisms. Significantly, no assessment of the inherent differences in storm signal capture between paleostorm archives has ever been made. As a consequence “apples and oranges” are shoehorned into agreement and we potentially misidentify both periodicities and mechanisms.
The aim of these projects is to fill current knowledge gaps regarding drivers of severe storm events in the eastern North Atlantic by reconstructing and analysing changes in storminess and storm track position during the 10 000 years. We study paired dune activity and peat paleostorm records from the same location at sites along two transects: the Faroe Islands-Scotland-Ireland and Norway-Sweden. A suite of classical proxies and rigorous age dating are applied to identify periods of storminess as well as reconstruct changes in relevant local factors including effective humidity, vegetation, relative sea level and human activity. This approach allows us to construct new paleostorm records that are well-constrained for local non-storm signals.
These two sister projects are funded as below:
Storminess in the Eastern North Atlantic Region during the Holocene
Project-ID: 2019-03434_VR
Project period VR: 1 jan 2020–31 dec 2023
Scandinavian Storminess during the Holocene: Separating the Signals
Project-ID: 2020-01536
Project period Formas: 1 jan 2021-31 dec 2023
Project members
Project managers
Malin Kylander
Associate professor of Sediment geochemistry
Members
Helena Alexanderson
Professor at Lund University, Sweden
Richard Bindler
Professor at Umeå University, Sweden
Dr. Timothy Mighall
Andreas Nylund
MSc student at Stockholm University
Frederik Schenk
Researcher
Jenny Sjöström
Post-doctoral researcher
More about this project
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