RECONSTRUCTING 1000 YEAR RECORD OF HURRICANE LANDFALL NEAR POCOMOKE SOUND, CHESAPEAKE BAY

The Chesapeake Bay region has experienced relatively few hurricane landfalls since the 1950s over which time its population has doubled. NOAA Best-Track data indicates that storms passing to the west of the Bay—which typically cause the greatest surge and/or intense rainfall—may have occurred in much greater numbers as recently as the late nineteenth century. Records that pre-date robust instrumental observations (<1850 CE), however, are needed to constrain what factors have controlled storm tracks in the western North Atlantic during the geologic past and how storm frequency in the Chesapeake Bay region may change in the coming decades. Here we use sediment cores collected from ~15 meters below sea level in the Pocomoke River paleo-channel (37.748383°, -75.871917°) to reconstruct a record of intense hurricane landfall during the past thousand years. Based on our preliminary chronology (²¹⁰Pb, ¹⁴C, pollen, industrial pollution horizons), we identified mm-scale sand beds likely deposited during Hurricane Isabel (2003), Hurricane Connie (1955) and the Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane (1933). Downcore data suggest that quiescent intervals with few storms, such as those of the past ~60 years, have been relatively uncommon over the past millennium and that much more frequent and/or intense hurricanes struck this area as recently as the early 19th century.