Lake-sediment record of late Holocene hurricane activities from coastal Alabama

Paleoecological record of hurricane disturbance and forest regeneration in Nicaragua

“…Because of the resulting changes in vegetation and fires that occurred after this event, this sand deposit is interpreted as the result of a storm surge after a hurricane. Liu and Fearn (1993) found similar sand layers in coastal ponds in Alabama correlating to hurricanes.…”

“…To identify and study past hurricanes, I analyzed a 5.0-m sediment core from Laguna Negra, Nicaragua. I found one sediment layer (292-296) ascribable to prehistoric hurricanes (Liu and Fearn, 1993, 1997, 2000Liu et al, 1994). Analyses that include a fineresolution paleoecological dissection of one of these layers are presented below.…”

A decadally-resolved paleohurricane record archived in the late Holocene sediments of a Florida sinkhole

“…When longer time periods are considered, changes in local hurricane frequency are more likely to reflect larger-scale changes in storm climate (Woodruff et al 2008a). Other sediment-based paleohurricane records from the Caribbean, Northeastern U.S., and the northern Gulf of Mexico have documented significant multi-centennial to millennialscale variability in hurricane frequency similar to the centennial to multi-centennial variability identified in the Mullet Pond reconstruction, though the timing and extent of the variability differs somewhat among the records (Liu and Fearn 1993, Liu and Fearn 2000, Scileppi and Donnelly 2007, Donnelly and Woodruff 2007. Fearn (1993, 2000) identified low-frequency variability in the number of visible sand layers deposited by hurricanes impacting Western Lake, Florida.…”

“…These proxies can be categorized into two main types: isotope-based proxies that rely on the detection of tropical cyclone rainfall signatures preserved in corals (Cohen 2001, Hetzinger et al 2008, tree rings (Miller et al 2006), and speleothems (Frappier et al 2007, Nott et al 2007, and sediment-based proxies such as cyclone surge-constructed beach ridges Hayne 2001, Nott et al 2009) and overwash deposits preserved in back barrier lagoons (Donnelly 2005, Donnelly and Woodruff 2007, Woodruff et al 2008a, Woodruff et al 2008b, Wallace and Anderson 2010, coastal lakes (Liu and Fearn 1993, Liu and Fearn 2000, Liu and Fearn 2002, Lambert et al 2003, Lambert et al 2008, and marshes (Donnelly et al 2001a, Donnelly et al 2001b, Donnelly et al 2004, Scileppi and Donnelly 2007, Boldt et al 2010. Isotope-based proxies have in some cases provided exceptional, sub-annual resolution; however, such records often span only a relatively short interval of time.…”

Dynamical downscaling of tropical cyclones from CCSM4 simulations of the Last Glacial Maximum

“…Moreover, there is significant interest in the field of paleotempestology to understand the conditions that affected the prehistoric record of TCs revealed by geologic proxies. While some widely used methods [e.g., Liu and Fearn, 1993;Donnelly and Woodruff, 2007;Frappier et al, 2007] provide data only for the most recent millennia (for which sedimentary records of overwash from barrier islands are available), nascent techniques using deep-sea cores recovered from sloping banks near the Florida current show the potential to uncover records back to earlier periods [Toomey et al, 2013]. Furthermore, some understanding (even qualitative) of the behavior of TCs during glacial periods would be useful to geologists, who have shown that tropical storms affected the geological evolution of islands in the western Pacific [Galewsky et al, 2006;Lin et al, 2008;Hayakawa and Takashi, 2009;Woodruff et al, 2009;Stark et al, 2010].…”