Title Information
Title
Floods, Droughts, and Tropical Cyclones: Investigating Climate Extremes through Variations in Lacustrine Sedimentology
Name: Personal
Name Part
Rodysill, Jessica Rose
Role
Role Term: Text
creator
Origin Information
Copyright Date
2014
Physical Description
Extent
19, 284 p.
digitalOrigin
born digital
Note
Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2014)
Name: Personal
Name Part
Russell, James
Role
Role Term: Text
Director
Name: Personal
Name Part
Donnelly, Jeffrey
Role
Role Term: Text
Director
Name: Personal
Name Part
Herbert, Timothy
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Prell, Warren
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Tullis, Jan
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Rodbell, Donald
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Corporate
Name Part
Brown University. Geological Sciences
Role
Role Term: Text
sponsor
Genre (aat)
theses
Abstract
Recent climate extremes, including floods, droughts, and hurricanes, have had devastating effects worldwide, driving new research aimed at developing better prediction of such events. Understanding how climate extreme intensity and frequency are influenced by changing mean climate conditions is essential to more accurately predict how their behavior will differ under a range of future climate conditions. This thesis focuses on reconstructing flooding and drought in East Java, Indonesia and tropical cyclones and flooding in northwest Florida, United States using lake sediment archives. Millennial-scale paleohydrologic variations in East Java are consistent with a strengthening of the Indonesian monsoon and southward migration of the ITCZ during the past millennium, while decadal-scale droughts reflect multi-decadal weakening of the Walker Circulation. I demonstrate that the strongest drought of the last millennium in East Java occurred between 1790 and 1860 CE and was the result of several closely-spaced strong El Niño events followed by several large volcanic eruptions. I argue that centennial-scale variations in rainfall-driven runoff in East Java likely reflect La Niña activity and suggest that El Niño and La Niña activity co-varied on centennial timescales over the last millennium, with higher activity occurring during the MCA relative to the LIA. I reconstructed tropical cyclone activity in northwest Florida and demonstrate that there are similarities between storm histories at this study site and in other northern Gulf of Mexico hurricane reconstructions that were lacking between the preexisting records in the region. My contribution to the research community supports preexisting hypotheses that proposed the Loop Current influences intense hurricane variability within the Gulf of Mexico. I introduce a new record of lake-level changes in northwest Florida that identifies a mid-Holocene drought, similar to lake-level reconstructions in northeastern United States. I reconstructed a Holocene-length record of river floods in northwest Florida from sinkhole lake sediments situated in the floodplain, which indicates that major flooding was less frequent during the mid-Holocene drought and suggests water table depth may be important in controlling extreme flooding.
Subject
Topic
Climate
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/864281")
Topic
Climatology
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/990901")
Topic
Lakes
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1111003")
Topic
Sedimentology
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/927573")
Topic
Floods
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/898449")
Topic
Droughts
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/964360")
Topic
Hurricanes
Record Information
Record Content Source (marcorg)
RPB
Record Creation Date (encoding="iso8601")
20141006
Language
Language Term: Code (ISO639-2B)
eng
Language Term: Text
English
Identifier: DOI
10.7301/Z0DF6PKF
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access
Collection is open for research.
Type of Resource (primo)
dissertations