Pacific Decadal Variability in the Southern Indian Ocean: A 1 ky Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation and Australian Megadrought Reconstruction from Law Dome, East Antarctica.

Abstract:

The Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) is a multidecadal mode of Pacific basin SST anomalies, and is the basin-wide, bi-hemispheric expression of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The two indices are highly correlated, but the extent to which they are merely low frequency ENSO is debated. Nonetheless, the IPO/PDO significantly influences interannual rainfall variability and drought risk across and beyond the Pacific region on multi-decadal timescales, thus an understanding of long-term IPO/PDO variability will help with assessing past and future drought risk.

A new and highly accurate 1 ky IPO reconstruction has been produced from the Law Dome ice core (East Antarctica). Law Dome is a high accumulation site on the coast of Antarctica in the Indian Ocean sector of the Southern Ocean, and the Law Dome record is directly related to atmospheric anomalies across a broad mid-latitude swathe of this region. The reconstruction utilizes both the accumulation (snowfall) and sea salt (wind proxy) records to produce a reconstruction that is highly calibrated to the instrumental IPO record from 1870-2009 and shows excellent skill (reduction of error value of 0.86).

We then super-imposed the 1 ky IPO on a Law Dome proxy for rainfall in eastern subtropical Australia (previously shown to represent rainfall with high significance during IPO positive phases (r =0.406–0.677, p <0.0001–0.01) to identify eight Australian ‘mega-droughts’ (dry periods >5 y duration) over the last millennium. Six mega-droughts occur between AD 1000-1320 including one 39 y drought (AD 1174–1212). Water resources and infrastructure planning in Australia has been based on very limited statistical certainty around drought risk due to the short instrumental record and lack of rainfall proxies. A recent drought (the ‘Big Dry’ ~1995-2009) brought both agricultural and urban water supplies to critically low levels, while the Murray-Darling Basin river system, which provides 65% of the water used for irrigation in Australia, was on the brink of ecosystem collapse. Clearly, decadal-scale droughts of the ‘Big Dry’ kind have occurred regularly in Australia’s past. This new reconstruction will help with assessing drought risk over the longer term in the Pacific Basin, particularly in the data-sparse Southern Hemisphere.