Bronwen Konecky has won a prestigious NSF CAREER Award to study rainfall changes in the Central America and northern South America region
Associate Professor Bronwen Konecky has won an NSF CAREER Award for her project titled “Mechanisms of Holocene Rainfall Change in the Northern Tropical Americas”. Konecky runs the Climate and Paleoclimate Laboratory in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. The lab investigates climate, water, and ecosystem variations in the Earth’s tropical regions, from the past ~150,000 years to the 21st century.
Changes in rainfall patterns are associated with disease outbreak and agricultural loss. Using leaf waxes collected from sediment cores in the Central America and northern South America region, and by analyzing earth system model simulations of rainfall changes, Konecky will reconstruct rainfall through the last 10,000 years, identify the drivers behind these changes, and investigate their relationships to broader rainfall patterns throughout the Americas and the global tropics.