Synthetic and practical reconstructions of SST and seawater pH using the novel multiproxy SMITE method
Hunter P Hughes,
Diane Thompson,
Gavin L Foster,
Jonathan Lees,
Donna Surge and
Christopher D Standish
PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 6, 1-32
Abstract:
Geochemical proxies of sea surface temperature (SST) and seawater pH (pHsw) in scleractinian coral skeletons are valuable tools for reconstructing tropical climate variability. However, most coral skeletal SST and pHsw proxies are univariate methods that are limited in their capacity to circumvent non-climate-related variability. Here we present a novel multivariate method for reconstructing SST and pHsw from the geochemistry of coral skeletons. Our Scleractinian Multivariate Isotope and Trace Element (SMITE) method optimizes reconstruction skill by leveraging the covariance across an array of coral elemental and isotopic data with SST and pHsw. First, using a synthetic proxy experiment, we find that SMITE SST reconstruction statistics (correlation, accuracy, and precision) are insensitive to noise and variable calibration period lengths relative to Sr/Ca. While SMITE pHsw reconstruction statistics remain relative to δ11B throughout the same synthetic experiment, the magnitude of the long-term trend in pHsw is progressively lost under conditions of moderate-to-high analytical uncertainty. Next, we apply the SMITE method to an array of seven coral-based geochemical variables (B/Ca, δ11B, Li/Ca, Mg/Ca, Sr/Ca, U/Ca & Li/Mg) measured from two Bermudan Porites astreoides corals. Despite a
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0305607 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 05607&type=printable (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0305607
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0305607
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().