On University at Albany Week: Knowing what came before can help us prepare for what’s ahead in our climate’s future.
Mathias Vuille, professor in the department of atmospheric and environmental sciences, digs in to search for clues.
Mathias Vuille is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University at Albany. His research interests are in past, current and future climate change in the tropics. Vuille was recently awarded more than $2 million from the National Science Foundation to lead two projects that are focused on climate change in South America.
Exploring Climate Change in South America
The South American summer monsoon brings heavy rainfall to much of tropical and subtropical South America during the austral summer, December to February, replenishing rivers and water sources that are crucial for agriculture, drinking water, sanitation and hydropower generation.
While the amount of rainfall delivered by the South American summer monsoon over the past 50 years or so is well know, this time period is too short to encompass the full range of monsoon variability. A thorough understanding of how widely the monsoon can vary and what causes monsoon failures and droughts or extreme monsoons seasons with flooding is critically important, given that we anticipate significant future rainfall changes to occur over much of South America due to climate change.
I’m currently leading a project, together with my postdoctoral research associate Zhiqiang Lyu, to develop a new product that can be used to reconstruct changes in the South American summer monsoon over the last thousand years. It relies on existing paleoclimate data in South America, such as ice cores and lake sediments from the Andes, and tree-ring records and cave sediment samples from the Amazon basin. Undergraduate and graduate students have traveled with me to Brazil over the past several years to help with fieldwork and assembling all the data needed to support this work.
This research will help us better understand past climate change in the region and allow us to put projected future changes in monsoon rainfall in a long-term historical context.
Funding for the project is also supporting a graduate student who is helping develop the monsoon reconstruction product, along with visualization tools that can be used by scientists, policy-and decision makers and as part of project-related educational outreach activities.
