Project Grant 2303513

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was awarded an $832,021 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Ocean Sciences under the Geosciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.050) to disentangle drivers of heat and freshwater transport through the Indonesian seas across timescales. The Institution will combine data from sediment cores with model simulations to investigate 1,100 years of changes in the Indonesian Throughflow. As part of this work, K-12 educational materials will be created for schools in the Indo-Pacific region. The award will support a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher conducting a modeling-data collection effort to gain insights into controls on the Indonesian Throughflow and how they may differ across timescales and background climate states over the last millennium. New sediment records reconstructed using geochemical and faunal measurements will extend instrumental records from the region to span the last 1,000 years. Dynamical interpretations of the data will be provided through ocean and climate models to evaluate the dominance of wind and buoyancy forcing on different timescales and link reconstructed variability to multidecadal variations in tropical Pacific mean state and monsoons. Models will also assess if and why modern warming has altered relationships between global temperature and atmospheric circulation, as well as evaluate climate impacts of variability and how they are transmitted through atmospheric or oceanic teleconnections in simulations and future projections.