Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Hurricanes represent a major threat to coastal communities and the economies of many nations, yet the climatological factors that are responsible for influencing their frequency, magnitude, and pathways remain poorly understood. The purpose of my research is to generate long-term records of Atlantic hurricane variability using geological proxy techniques. The geographic focus of my research is Cuba, which has the longest coastline of any island in the Caribbean and is frequently affected by hurricane activity. When hurricanes impact coastlines, the storm surge transports offshore sediment landward, and the salinity of onshore brackish and freshwater systems increases. My study will be undertaken through an intensive sediment-coring program at coastal wetlands in Cuba, and I will identify past hurricane strikes in these cores using sedimentological, micropaleontological, and geochemical indicators of storm surges and their impacts. This work will add to a growing network of paleo-hurricane records from the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and east coast of North America. In doing so, it will help us understand the relationship between hurricane variability, general atmospheric circulation, and other climate phenomena such as El Ni¨o. My project will also provide essential information on hurricane return period, and is therefore relevant to Canada as Atlantic hurricanes frequently impact the Maritime Provinces. Finally, this work will provide essential data to test models of hurricane responses to higher atmospheric and sea surface temperatures, which will help us predict how hurricanes will respond to future global warming.