The observational record only provides a limited view of how the climate system works because it only spans the past ~150 years. Proxy records allow us to 'extend' the observations and to understand how the climate system varies and respond to external forcings on timescales that are beyond the observational record. In my research, I generate new proxy records and combine them with other published records to obtain a spatiotemporal view of how the climate system has evolved in the past.

Heat and hydroclimate extremes can significantly disrupt societies and ecosystems. Co-occurrences across distinct regions (spatially compound) and back-to-back occurrences (temporally compound) of these events in recent years have particularly been noted because of the devastating impacts to global socio-economic systems. However, our knowledge of the characteristics and drivers of these events remains limited. My research focuses on diagnosing the drivers of specific extreme events and characterizing past extreme events through the lens of paleoclimate reconstructions. 

The climate system varies naturally through interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, vegetation, ice sheets, and sea ice and can be forced by changes in boundary conditions (e.g., orbital configurations, atmospheric greenhouse gases concentration). Even though observations (instrumental and proxy records) allow us to understand the spatiotemporal evolution of the climate system, it is difficult to infer the dynamics behind. My research uses climate models to understand how external forcings can drive climate variability in the climate system and integrate them with proxy records to understand the mechanisms involved in driving changes observed in proxy records.

Climate models are the primary tools to understand how the future climate would be. However, climate models are also imperfect representations of the world and contain biases and errors. I compare these state-of-the-art climate models with observations (both instrumental and proxy records) to determine the fidelity of climate models in simulating different aspects of the climate system (e.g., multidecadal variability, megadroughts).

Proxy records is the primary means to understand past environmental changes. However, they are indirect recorders of the past environment. Therefore, we can only infer how the environment has changed in the past based on these indirect records.  Even though we have gained a better understanding on how different proxies respond to the environment, there remain nuances on what these proxy records represent. My research applies statistical techniques to instrumental data and proxy records to better understand how well these geochemical measurements capture climate variables and what environmental/climatic interpretations can be made from these proxy records.