Publications by authors named "B H Luckman"

Article Synopsis
  • South American societies are vulnerable to climatic changes due to insufficient long-term climate data, but recent advancements in tree ring chronologies have created a comprehensive network of 286 records that track hydroclimate variability since 1400 CE.
  • The South American Drought Atlas (SADA) has been developed using this data alongside the self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index, providing the most detailed hydrological reconstruction for the region and correlating well with historical climate events.
  • The SADA reveals that El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Southern Annular Mode (SAM) strongly influence droughts and rainfall variability, with the analysis indicating an increasing trend towards severe droughts and extreme rainfall in South America linked to climate change and greenhouse
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The rivers originating in the southern Andes (18°-55°S) support numerous ecosystems and a large number of human populations and socio-economic activities in the adjacent lowlands of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. Here we show that ca. 75% of the total variance in the streamflow records from this extensive region can be explained by only eight spatially coherent patterns of variability.

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Earthquakes with magnitudes M > 7 can trigger large landslides and rockfalls at epicenter distances of up to 400 km, whereas moderate shaking (M = 5-7) is generally thought to result in abundant co-seismic mass movements in the vicinity of the epicenter. Although one might anticipate that large magnitude earthquakes off the Chilean coast would result in abundant rockfall in the Patagonian Cordillera, only limited research has explored this hypothesis. Here, we use tree-ring records from 63 cross-sections of century-old (103.

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Article Synopsis
  • * The incorrect URL given was 'https://www.ams.ethz.ch/research.html', which has been corrected to 'http://www.ams.ethz.ch/research/published-data.html'.
  • * The correction has been updated in both the PDF and HTML formats of the article.
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Though tree-ring chronologies are annually resolved, their dating has never been independently validated at the global scale. Moreover, it is unknown if atmospheric radiocarbon enrichment events of cosmogenic origin leave spatiotemporally consistent fingerprints. Here we measure the C content in 484 individual tree rings formed in the periods 770-780 and 990-1000 CE.

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