Tripti Bhattacharya
Tripti Bhattacharya received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied paleoclimate and climate dynamics. Her subsequent postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona focused on the response of the North American Monsoon, to climate change. Her current work focuses on midlatitude circulations in past warm climates, Earth system feedbacks, and hydroclimate dynamics. She is a Sloan Foundation Fellow and has won an NSF CAREER Award. She has recently been awarded the rank of associate professor, and holds a Thonis Family Professorship at Syracuse University.
Reconstructing the Plio-Pleistocene History of the North American Monsoon
Monsoons are critical features of the global hydrological cycle, yet their fundamental dynamics remain unclear in many regions. The North American Monsoon (NAM) remains one of the most poorly understood monsoon systems. In this talk, I present some of my lab group’s work on the Cenozoic paleoenvironmental history of the NAM. The strong seasonal cycle of rainfall isotopes in southwestern North America permits the reconstruction of NAM rainfall using archives that record past precipitation isotopes. As a result, we have used hydrogen isotopic analyses of leaf waxes preserved in continental margin sediments to reconstruct the history of the NAM over the Plio-Pleistocene. Our results show that regional sea surface temperature patterns played a key role in regulating the Plio-Pleistocene evolution of monsoon rainfall. This has direct applicability for understanding hydroclimate in the desert southwest in the present-day, since similar underlying dynamics govern 21st century extremes in monsoon rainfall. This work therefore illustrates how improving our understanding of past climate states can generate lessons for adapting to the 21st century.
