Sear, NERC, Urgency Grant -The Legacy of Cyclone Pam

Tropical cyclones bring devastation to Island communities in the South Pacific. Understanding the drivers of Cyclone frequency and magnitude are key aims of meteorological agencies in the region. However, the datasets these organisations have to work with to better understand cyclones and their relationship to the regional pacific climate are short (often less than 50 years). Closed lake basins act like giant rain gauges, storing records of past climate and cyclone events stretching back over thousands of years. A key challenge is to identify the fingerprint of cyclone events within these lake sediment archives. The recent Category 5 cyclone Pam that devastated Vanuatu, provides a unique opportunity to fingerprint a known high magnitude cyclone event from a lake on Efate, Vanuatu. Working with local Meteorological and Geohazard agencies, we will collect surface sediments and a replicate long core of sediment with which to a) reconstruct the characteristics of the known recent cyclone sediments, and b) use that information to identify past cyclones within the longer record. We will then link the cyclone record to wider regional climate behaviour over a period in which major changes in El-Nino Southern Oscillation and the South Pacific Convergence Zone have occurred. We will train and disseminate the knowledge gained back to the Vanuatu agencies, providing new data and insight into cyclone forcing mechanisms.