Jessica Conroy
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Earth & Environmental Science
Much of what we know about past climate comes from chemical signals locked in natural archives such as coral skeletons, windblown dust deposits and sediments. Turning those signals back into statements about ancient temperature, rainfall or wind requires knowing exactly what the signal records, and that is often ambiguous.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
El Nino-Southern Oscillation
stable isotopes
oxygen isotopes
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Map an oxygen isotope "isoscape" of the modern tropical Pacific from long-running seawater and precipitation collection sites, showing how seawater and rainfall isotope values shift between El Niño and La Niña phases.
- Build a high-resolution, isotope-enabled ocean reanalysis for the Pacific basin and use it to quantify how much ocean circulation, atmospheric moisture balance and precipitation oxygen isotopes each contribute to seawater isotope anomalies during each phase of the cycle.
- Quantify the separate influences of seawater oxygen isotopes and temperature on coral oxygen isotope values, and test whether coral records indicate stronger El Niño-related hydroclimate variability in recent decades.
- Compile a publicly available synthesis of Northern Hemisphere extratropical wind directions at the Last Glacial Maximum, inferred from aeolian archives such as loess deposits and sand dunes with ages constrained to that interval.
- Rank general circulation models by how well their simulated Last Glacial Maximum near-surface wind directions match the paleowind synthesis, using Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project runs and the Trace-21k and iTrace transient deglacial experiments.
- Test how individual climate drivers and ice sheet topography set glacial wind direction and stationary wave properties, using single-forcing experiments, runs with different ice sheet models, and comparison against equator-to-pole and ocean-land temperature gradients.
More about the research
Two projects here attack that ambiguity from different directions: one works out what oxygen isotopes in tropical Pacific corals really say about El Niño and La Niña, and the other uses geologic evidence of ancient wind direction to test how well climate models reproduce atmospheric circulation. Both compare measurements against model simulations to decide which interpretations and which models can be trusted.
Why it matters
El Niño and La Niña events bring floods and droughts to populations around the Pacific, and knowing whether they have intensified in recent decades depends on reading coral records correctly; separating temperature from water-cycle signals in those records would sharpen that assessment and support planning for future events. On the wind side, model projections of future near-surface winds disagree substantially, and testing them against ice-age wind evidence could identify which models are biased, with relevance for both climate projections and assessments of future wind energy resources.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: Stable isotope constraints on the hydrologic expression of the El Nino/Southern Oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean
NSF · Aug 2025 – Jul 2028
Collaborative Research: P2C2--Paleowind Synthesis of Models and Data to Constrain the Response of Extratropical Atmospheric Circulation to External Forcing
NSF · Sep 2022 – Aug 2027
Closest labs
Samantha Stevenson
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Build an oxygen isotope "isoscape" of tropical Pacific seawater and rainfall during El Niño and La Niña, using samples from long-running collection sites and a new high-resolution, isotope-enabled ocean reanalysis.
Diana Thatcher
Iowa State University, IA·Earth & Environmental Science
Reconstruct annually resolved, millennial-length northeast Pacific sea-surface temperatures from growth increments in shells of the Pacific geoduck, a long-lived marine clam.
Jean Lynch-Stieglitz
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test how changes in tropical winds alter thermocline depth across the Indo-Pacific by running sensitivity experiments in a high-resolution ocean model.
The school
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: 41 labs on PI Pages, $907M a year on research, 870 research doctorates a year.
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