Corals as Climate Archive

Summary

Instrumental climate records are too short to resolve the full range of decadal- to multidecadal-scale natural climate variability. Massive annually banded corals from the tropical and subtropical oceans provide a paleoclimatic archive with a clear seasonal resolution, documenting past variations in water temperature, hydrologic balance, and ocean circulation. Recent coral-based paleoclimatic research has focused mainly on the tropics, providing important implications on the past variability of the El Niño—Southern Oscillation phenomenon and decadal tropical climate variability. New records from some of the rare subtropical/mid-latitude locations of coral growth were shown to reflect aspects of dominant modes of Northern Hemisphere climate variability, e.g., the North Atlantic Oscillation/Arctic Oscillation. These natural climatic modes have important socio-economic impacts owing to their large-scale modulation of droughts, floods, storms, snowfall, and fish stocks. Coral records from key locations provide the opportunity to assess recent shifts of these modes with respect to the natural climate variability of the pre-instrumental period. Providing a better understanding of their dynamics, coral records, together with records derived from other paleoclimatic archives, are essential for a better predictability of future climate.