Raquel's new paper in Nature Geoscience

Our group published a paper in Nature Geoscience yesterday, entitled: Climatic and volcanic forcing of tropical belt northern boundary over the past 800 years

Raquel Alfaro-Sanchez took the lead on this paper and had help from Tree-Ring Lab colleagues Stefan Klesse, Amy Hudson, Soumaya Belmecheri, Russ Monson, Henry Diaz, and Valerie, as well as Hanh Nguyen, Nesibe Kose, and Ricardo Villalba. Congrats, Raquel!

here's the link to a full-text, read-only version of the paper: https://rdcu.be/9i8t

In this paper, we used tree rings from 5 locations across the Northern Hemisphere to develop the first reconstruction of NH Hadley Circulation variability over the last 800 years. 

main findings of the paper:
(1) we find a distinct contraction of the NH tropical belt following large volcanic eruptions, which has implications for potential future solar radiation management ("artificial volcano") strategies;
(2) our reconstruction shows a 6-decade period of tropical expansion from 1568-1634, which resulted in drought conditions and contributed to co-occurring societal disruptions across the NH: Pueblo drought, Jamestown drought, Ottoman Crisis, Ming Dynasty collapse;
(3) given the projections of tropical expansion under future climate change, our results warn for potential hemispheric-scale societal impacts.