Tracking westerly wind directions over Europe since the middle Holocene

The variability of the northern westerlies has been considered as one of the key elements for modern and past climate evolution. Their multiscale behavior and underlying control mechanisms, however, are incompletely understood, owing to the complex dynamics of Atlantic sea-level pressures. Here, we present a multi-annually resolved record of the westerly drift over the past 6,500 years from northern Italy. In combination with more than 20 other westerly-sensitive records, our results depict the non-stationary westerly-affected regions over mainland Europe on multi-decadal to multi-centennial time scales, showing that the direction of the westerlies has changed with respect to the migrations of the North Atlantic centers of action since the middle Holocene. Our findings suggest the crucial role of the migrations of the North Atlantic dipole in modulating the westerly-affected domain over Europe, possibly modulated by Atlantic Ocean variability.

Hsun-Ming Hu, Valerie Trouet, Christoph Spötl, Hsien-Chen Tsai, Wei-Yi Chien, Wen-Hui Sung, Véronique Michel, Jin-Yi Yu, Patricia Valensi, Xiuyang Jiang, Fucai Duan, Yongjin Wang, Horng-Sheng Mii, Yu-Min Chou, Mahjoor Ahmad Lone, Chung-Che Wu, Elisabetta Starnini, Marta Zunino, Takaaki K. Watanabe, Tsuyoshi Watanabe, Huang-Hsiung Hsu, G.W.K. Moore, Giovanni Zanchetta, Carlos Pérez-Mejías, Shih-Yu Lee, Chuan-Chou Shen