Hello stranger.

I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, with Dr Kim Cobb . Broadly speaking, my research is concerned with the role of the Tropics in long-term climate change. The central actor of this game is of course the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, whose behavior I strive to understand on decadal to millennial timescales.

My current research project is "Constraining the tropical Pacific’s role in low-frequency climate change of the last millennium", with Drs Kim Cobb, Michael Mann, Nick Graham, Mike Alexander and Martin Hoerling.

The first phase of this project entails reconstructing tropical Pacific sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) back to 1000 A.D. Here's the general idea : consider the picture painted in the tropical Pacific by the instrumental record of the past 150 years. We can represent this using a time and a location index (362 points, each corresponding to a 5 by 5 degree box - in longitude and latitude - over the region). The following picture is such a represensation of SST, smoothed with a 10-year lowpass filter to highlight the slow evolution of the ENSO system.

As you can see, it looks rather like a tapestry. The question is :

How can we weave the climate tapestry back in time ?

To do this is, i use multiple proxies from around the tropics, and a statistical method called RegEM due to Tapio Schneider. Results coming soon...