Eastern Mediterranean Climate
Principal Investigators: Ramzi Touchan and David Meko
Funding Agency: NSF Paleoclimatology
Award Period: 09/01/08 - 08/31/11
The long version of the title is "Spatiotemporal Drought Variability of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean from Tree Rings". A main objective of this study is to develop new tree-ring chronologies from the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean and apply them to study the spatio-temporal variability of drought
Research Topics
- Complete development of the tree-ring proxy network necessary for multi-century drought reconstructions of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East (Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and Lebanon), by geographically and temporally extending and enhancing the existing tree-ring dataset.
- Study patterns of large-scale spatiotemporal climate variations impacting the Middle East via integration of these newly-developed proxy data into spatially-complete gridded climate field reconstructions of drought for the entire Eurasian-Mediterranean Rim, and identify the relationship between regional drought, radiative forcing, and atmosphere-ocean dynamics.