This dissertation presents the results of statistical analyses of large climate datasets from two time intervals – the 20th century instrumental record and the proxy record of the last deglaciation – in order to understand the forcings and mechanisms of past climate variability.
A longstanding question in climate dynamics concerns...
The purpose of this thesis is to analyze an abrupt case of climate change in the past as a means to understand the mechanisms that force climate change. By looking to past analogs of climate change, we hopefully will gain an understanding of these events, which could be used to...
Large river basins integrate the signal of water from atmospheres to oceans. Climate change is widely expected to alter streamflow and potentially disrupt water management systems. We tested the ecological resilience -- capacity of headwater ecosystems to sustain streamflow under climate change – and the engineering resilience – capacity of...
The Southern Ocean plays an important role in the ocean’s uptake of heat and carbon yet the processes controlling this uptake are not well understood. To date, more than 100 biogeochemical profiling floats that measure water column pH, oxygen, nitrate, fluorescence, and backscattering at 10-day intervals have been deployed throughout...
The variability of coastal carbonate chemistry continues to provide significant hurdles for understanding interactions between anthropogenic and natural CO2 cycling and resultant effects on coastal acidification dynamics. Attribution of the anthropogenic component is vital for identifying the impacts of increasing atmospheric carbon on coastal habitats such as coral reefs, upwelling...
Discussions around adapting water management systems to climate change often express the need to increase the flexibility and adaptive capacity of current systems, and to implement robust strategies going forth. While these topics lie at the center of many climate change discussions, transforming adaptation recommendations into tangible tools and information...
Ecosystems are highly heterogeneous systems subjected to important levels of environmental variability; however, it is common in terrestrial biogeochemical models to assume homogeneous properties of the elements of the system or constant environmental conditions. For some processes, heterogeneity in these models is treated very simplistically, but there is not much...