The Role of Tropics in Fundamental Changes in Earth Climate

This proposed initiative aims to improve our understanding of past changes in tropical ocean and atmosphere circulation and how they may have contributed to fundamental changes in global climate. The tropics are the heat engines driving planetary-scale ocean and atmosphere circulation, and studies of modern climate show variations in tropical climate to be the dominant source of natural global climate variability at interannual and perhaps longer timescales. The accumulating evidence that substantial past climate changes, abrupt or otherwise, register in the tropics and temperate and high latitudes of both hemispheres, indicate that the tropics play a role.

Relative to a wealth of research on past changes in high-latitude climate, we know comparatively little about how tropical oceans and atmospheres varied in the recent and more distant geologic past, and even less about how these changes may have interacted with extratropical climate processes. This initiative would solicit research proposals that focus on the development of quantitative paleoclimate and paleoceanographic records which document how tropical oceans and atmospheres changed across fundamental junctures in late Cenozoic climate evolution at tectonic, orbital, and millennial timescale. This initiative would also encourage studies of climate theory and modeling that examine past changes in the sensitivity of tropical climate processes to known forcing factors, and how these changes may have been dynamically linked to changes in high-latitude climate.

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