EVALUATING LAKE RESPONSE TO RAPID WARMING IN WESTERN NEW YORK USING A PROXY SYSTEM MODEL

This century, the Great Lakes region is projected to experience drier summers and wetter winters due to anthropogenic climate change. Accurate reconstructions of past climate, which can quantify the hydrological response to past rapid warming events and improve climate model projections, are essential for climate change mitigation and adaptation. Lake sediments are key archives of past climate because they contain numerous proxies that are sensitive to a range of local and regional climate variables. Understanding which lake systems are most sensitive to rapid warming events will facilitate lake selection for paleoclimate research in the Great Lakes region. Lake water stable isotope (δ¹⁸O and δ²H) values reflect many aspects of the water cycle, and lake water temperature relates to air temperature. These parameters reflect lake sensitivity to different climate system components and are recorded by paleoclimate proxies in lake sediments. Processes within lake systems, such as residence time, control a lake’s sensitivity to different aspects of the climate system, for example winter precipitation. Lake proxy system models can assess a lake’s sensitivity to aspects of the climate system prior to sample collection, and can subsequently support quantitative interpretations of lake sediment proxy records. We will test the hypothesis that small, closed-basin lakes are more sensitive to rapid warming than large lakes with outflows. We will focus on lakes on the Laurentide Ice Sheet terminal moraine because their sediments likely record multiple rapid warming events over the past 15,000 kya. Red Pond (42.142°N, 78.912°W) is a closed-basin, meromictic kettle lake located in southwestern New York in the lake effect snow belt region of Lake Erie. We have collected limnological data, including temperature, lake level, dissolved oxygen, and stable water isotopes, from Red Pond since September 2021. We use these data to calibrate a lake proxy system model. Next, we run sensitivity tests to evaluate lake surface water temperature and lake surface water stable isotope values before and after intervals of rapid warming. We will present results of the lake model calibration and sensitivity tests and examine lake response to rapid warming.