Research

Leveraging climate modes to forecast coral bleaching months in advance

Coral bleaching increasingly impacts both wild and restored populations across the Caribbean, fueling the implementation of preparedness and mitigation protocols to minimize damage and maximize recovery. However, traditional alert systems, such as the Degree Heating Week (DHW) metric, provide insufficient time to prepare, and forecasts are often inaccurate, especially at the local scales at which management decisions are made. We present a new forecast metric for the Southern Caribbean that utilizes well-studied large-scale climate modes to optimize prediction accuracy and extend lead time out to 6 months prior to bleaching.

Establishing links between large-scale climate variability and reef-scale conditions

Satellite data, which is frequently used to quantify heat stress on coral reefs in order to predict whether a coral bleaching event will occur, often yields inaccurate predictions because the data are too coarsely resolved to capture heterogeneous on-reef conditions and do not account for variations at depth. Using a high-resolution 3-D hydrodynamic model of the Belize Barrier Reef, we investigate how large-scale climate modes interact with local ocean dynamics to drive spatially complex patterns of heat stress at reef depth.

Validating a new coral-based thermometer

The geochemistry of massive coral skeletons can be used to estimate past ocean temperatures and fill in critical gaps in the historical record where direct measurements are unavailable, such as before the modern observational era. However, the accuracy of single element-to-calcium ratio thermometers (such as the commonly used Sr/Ca) is limited by biological factors that influence coral composition. Here, we demonstrate the ability of Sr-U, a relatively novel coral thermometer that corrects for biological effects on Sr/Ca, to successfully isolate the temperature signal from the Rayleigh fractionation signal in a slow-growing Caribbean coral.

Past hothouse periods in Earth’s history

My undergraduate research focused on reconstructing North Atlantic ocean temperatures across the Miocene Epoch (~23–5.3 million years ago), with a focus on the Miocene Climate Optimum (17–14.8 Ma)—a potential analog for future anthropogenic warming. I was particularly interested in how a warmer ocean may have influenced the formation of North Atlantic Deep Water, a key driver of global ocean circulation that helps regulate Earth’s long-term climate.