CROSSROADS · Climate ReOrganizations at Synoptic Scale as Recorded in the Offshore Archives of the Dead Sea
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-09-01 → 2025-08-31
- EU contribution
- €264,669
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Climate ReOrganizations at Synoptic Scale as Recorded in the Offshore Archives of the Dead Sea
The recent warming trend has intensified drought across the Mediterranean region (MR), a hotspot of projected future aridity according to the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report. Water scarcity threatens societies, economies, and ecosystems and can amplify political tensions, especially in the Middle East. These changes are largely driven by atmospheric circulation at synoptic scales, which controls the transport of heat and moisture to continents—most strongly during winter. In the Northern Hemisphere midlatitudes (~30–65°N), strengthened or northward-shifted westerlies favor warm, wet winters in northern Eurasia but cause cooler, drier winters farther south. Because Mediterranean rainfall occurs almost entirely in winter, the intensity and position of westerlies critically determine regional water availability. Therefore, accurate modeling of circulation changes is vital for assessing drought risks under climate change. While models reliably reproduce global temperature trends, they often fail to capture fine-scale atmospheric dynamics. Paleoclimate data help constrain such models by comparing simulated and reconstructed variables. However, traditional proxies often mix multiple environmental influences, limiting their precision. The CROSSROADS project introduced a new approach to reconstructing past changes in westerly-driven climate variability. The project's aim was to (i) develop new paleothermometry, paleo-brine, and lake-level reconstruction methods to quantify temperature and hydrological changes; (ii) apply these to the Dead Sea—a key location for diagnosing shifts in the westerlies; and (iii) test them across the Holocene, when discrepancies between model outputs and proxy data remain unresolved.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Water availability in the Mediterranean basin is projected to decrease in the future in the 6th IPCC report. It is largely influenced by wintertime synoptic atmospheric circulations, as the westerlies play a crucial role in the distribution of both rainfall and heat. However, to date, climate models have lacked the accuracy to predict the evolution of atmospheric circulations, making water availability projections uncertain and thus hampering adaptation strategies by policy makers. The Holocene epoch has been extensively studied to refine our understanding of climate and test the efficiency of climate models and proxies. And yet, mismatches among proxies and models leave the issue of the mechanisms and evolution of the westerlies still unresolved. In this fellowship, we will address this issue by studying the Holocene sediments recovered from the deep Dead Sea. The deep Dead Sea temperature is mainly influenced by winter air temperature and its level depends on the Jordan discharge that is fueled by winter rainfall, making this site ideal to reconstruct the winter variables affected by the westerlies. We will use novel methods based on spectroscopy and spectrometry on salt fluid inclusions (FIs) to reconstruct Holocene lake temperature and composition and we will develop a new method exploiting the lake composition, thickness of deposited salt, speed of sound in FIs, sediments microfacies and X-ray fluorescence elemental composition to reconstruct lake levels. As, in these arid latitudes, it has been impossible so far to obtain Holocene winter temperatures and hydrological reconstructions are scant, and because this site responds in an unusual way to changes in westerlies, I believe this action will prove key in understanding the evolution of the westerlies.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- GFZ HELMHOLTZ-ZENTRUM FUR GEOFORSCHUNG · POTSDAMCoordinatorGermany
- THE RESEARCH FOUNDATION OF STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK · Albany NyUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union