Scandinavian Storminess during the Holocene: Separating the Signals

Over the last decades, the eastern North Atlantic region has experienced an increase in severe windstorms.

While it is expected that storminess (frequency and intensity) will increase with climate change, there is considerable uncertainty in this prediction.

This is due in part to the fact that we lack information about natural changes in storminess over centennial to millennial time scales.

This project fills this gap by reconstructing past storminess using paired dune building and peat paleostorm records from three sites along the Norwegian coast and in a new approach, at two inland Swedish sites.

A suite of proxies and age dating tools are applied to identify periods of storminess and reconstruct changes in local factors including effective humidity, vegetation, relative sea level and anthropogenic activity.

This allows us to assess differences between these key archives and construct new paleostorm records that are well-constrained for climatic and non-climatic signals. We then build on this transect using published records.

Principal component and spectral analyses are used to extract common storm signals across the compiled records and identify any signal periodicity in (sub-)regions.

The results are compared with relevant paleoclimate records and climate model simulations in order to identify the most important climate mechanisms driving storminess on Holocene time scales. This information is critical to predicting and mitigating future storminess in Europe.