NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - CoralHydro2k Database (Common Era coral d18O and Sr/Ca data compilation)

STUDY NOTES: This file provides a summary of the data contained in the PAGES CoralHydro2k database. This is a coral d18O and Sr/Ca database with corals from the Common Era. Most data in the database covers the 1800s to the late 1990s. Individual records reach further back in time. Records are sorted into "groups" (coreGroup) based on the availability of paired d18O-Sr/Ca data, the time period covered, and the temporal resolution of the proxy data. Current Version: 1.0.0
ABSTRACT SUPPLIED BY ORIGINATOR: The response of the hydrological cycle to anthropogenic climate change, especially across the tropical oceans, remains poorly understood due to the scarcity of long instrumental temperature and hydrological records. Massive shallow-water corals are ideally suited to reconstructing past oceanic variability as they are widely distributed across the tropics, rapidly deposit calcium carbonate skeletons that continuously record ambient environmental conditions, and can be sampled at monthly to annual resolution. Climate reconstructions based on corals primarily use the stable oxygen isotope composition (δ18O), which acts as a proxy for sea surface temperature (SST), and the oxygen isotope composition of seawater (δ18Osw), a measure of hydrological variability. Increasingly, coral δ18O time series are paired with time series of strontium-to-calcium ratios (), a proxy for SST, from the same coral to quantify temperature and δ18Osw variability through time. To increase the utility of such reconstructions, we present the CoralHydro2k database, a compilation of published, peer-reviewed coral and δ18O records from the Common Era (CE). The database contains 54 paired –δ18O records and 125 unpaired or δ18O records, with 88 % of these records providing data coverage from 1800 CE to the present. A quality-controlled set of metadata with standardized vocabulary and units accompanies each record, informing the use of the database. The CoralHydro2k database tracks large-scale temperature and hydrological variability. As such, it is well-suited for investigations of past climate variability, comparisons with climate model simulations including isotope-enabled models, and application in paleodata-assimilation projects. The CoralHydro2k database is available in Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format with serializations in MATLAB, R, and Python and can be downloaded from the NOAA National Center for Environmental Information's Paleoclimate Data Archive at https://doi.org/10.25921/yp94-v135 (Walter et al., 2022).