CPD Climate of the Past Discussions CPD 1814-9359 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/cpd-6-1045-2010 Past dynamics of the Australian monsoon: precession, phase and links to the global monsoon Beaufort L. 1 van der Kaars S. 2 Bassinot F. C. 3 Moron V. 1 4 CEREGE, CNRS-Universités Aix-Marseille, UMR 6635, Aix en Provence, France Centre for Palynology and Palaeoecology, School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Victoria, 3800, Australia LSCE, CEA-CNRS, Gif sur Yvette, France IRI, Columbia University, New York, USA 01 06 2010 6 3 1045 1076 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/6/1045/2010/cpd-6-1045-2010.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/6/1045/2010/cpd-6-1045-2010.pdf

Past variations in the dynamics of the Australian monsoon have been estimated from multi-proxy analysis of a core retrieved in the Eastern Banda Sea. Records of coccolith and pollen assemblages, spanning the last 150,000 years, allow reconstruction of past primary production in the Banda Sea, summer moisture availability, and the length of the dry season in Northern Australia and Southeastern Indonesia. The amount of moisture available during the summer monsoon follows typical glacial/interglacial dynamics with a broad asymmetrical 100-kyr cycle. Primary production and length of the dry season appear to be closely related, given that they follow the precessional cycle with the same phase (August insolation). This indicates their independence from ice-volume variations. The present inter-annual variability of both parameters is related to El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which modulates the Australian Winter Monsoon (AWM). The precessional pattern observed in the past dynamics of the AWM is found in ENSO and monsoon records of other regions. A marked shift in the monsoon intensity occurring during the mid Holocene during a period of constant ice volume, suggest that low latitude climatic variation precedes global ice volume. This precessional pattern suggests that a common forcing mechanism underlies low latitude climate dynamics, acting specifically and synchronically on the different monsoon systems.

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