24
October 2002
Climate change: Stormy weather, naturally
New data on the climate evolution of the heavily populated northeastern United States over the past 13,000 years suggest that natural variation could be an important factor in the increased incidence of severe weather in recent centuries. Lake sediments in the hills of east Vermont and New York provide a record of extreme rainstorms and suggest a rhythm of about 3,000 years in their occurrence. The incidence of exceptional precipitation events is in close step with that recorded in the Greenland ice core palaeoclimate data, with both records showing an upswing in storminess over the past 600 years.
Millennial-scale storminess variability in the northeastern
United States during the Holocene epoch
ANDERS
J. NOREN, PAUL R. BIERMAN, ERIC J. STEIG, ANDREA LINI & JOHN SOUTHON
Nature
419, 821–824 (2002); doi:10.1038/nature01132
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