Orbital and millennial northern mid-latitude westerlies over the last glacial period

Abstract

The northern mid-latitude westerlies play an important role in the climate interactions between the low and high latitudes. Our understanding of the factors that control the latitudinal displacement of the westerlies remains incomplete due to insufficient climatic proxy. Here we present a latitudinal-shift record of the westerlies in the eastern Central Asia over the past 70,000 years, on the basis of the grain size of the loess sequence from the Tacheng basin. On millennial timescale, the variation of the reconstructed westerlies resembles that of the Greenland temperature and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), indicating the role of the AMOC on the westerlies. On orbital time scale, their variation is controlled by precession and insolation. Our analyses of the LOVECLIM and CCSM3 models’ results show that the impact of insolation and AMOC on the latitudinal shift of the westerlies is through changing the latitudinal temperature and pressure gradients.