The project captured a subset of the hydrological cycle for the tropical island of O'ahu, linking precipitation to groundwater recharge and aquifer storage. We determined seasonal storm events contributed more to aquifer recharge than year‐round baseline orographic trade wind rainfall. Hydrogen and oxygen isotope values from an island‐wide rain collector network with 20 locations deployed for 16 months and sampled at 3‐month intervals were used to create the first local meteoric water line for O'ahu. Isotopic measurements were influenced by the amount effect, seasonality, storm type, and La Niña, though little elevation control was noted. Certain groundwater compositions from legacy data showed a strong similarity with collected precipitation from our stations. The majority of these significant relationships were between wet season precipitation and groundwater. A high number of moderate and heavy rainfall days during the dry season, large percentage of event‐based rainfall, and wind directions outside of the typical NE trade wind direction were characteristics of the 2017–2018 wet season. This indicates that the majority of wet season precipitation is from event‐based storms rather than typical trade wind weather. The deuterium‐excess values provided the strongest evidence of a relationship between groundwater and different precipitation sources, indicating that this may be a useful metric for determining the extent of recharge from different rain events and systems.
The history of the Polynesian civilization on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) over the Common Era has come to exemplify the fragile relationship humans have with their environment. Social dynamics, deforestation, land degradation, and climatic shifts have all been proposed as important parts of the settlement history and societal transformations on Rapa Nui. Furthermore, climate dynamics of the Southeast Pacific have major global implications. While the wetlands of Rapa Nui contain critical sedimentological archives for reconstructing past hydrological change on the island, connections between the island’s hydroclimate and fundamental aspects of regional climatology are poorly understood. Here we present a hydroclimatology of Rapa Nui showing that there is a clear seasonal cycle of precipitation, with wet months receiving almost twice as much precipitation as dry months. This seasonal cycle can be explained by the seasonal shifts in the location and strength of the climatological south Pacific subtropical anticyclone. For interannual precipitation variability, we find that the occurrence of infrequent, large rain events explains 92% of the variance of the observed annual mean precipitation time series. Approximately one third (33%) of these events are associated with atmospheric rivers, 21% are associated with classic cold-front synoptic systems, and the remainder are characterized by cut-off lows and other synoptic-scale storm systems. As a group, these large rain events are most strongly controlled by the longitudinal position of the south Pacific subtropical anticyclone. The longitudinal location of this anticyclone explains 21% of the variance in the frequency of large rain events, while the remaining variance is left unexplained by any other major atmosphere-ocean dynamics. We find that over the observational era there appears to be no linear relationship between the number of large rain events and any other major climate phenomena. With the south Pacific subtropical anticyclone projected to strengthen and expand westward under global warming, our results imply that Rapa Nui will experience an increase in the number of dry years in the future.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10368086
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Climate Dynamics
- Volume:
- 59
- Issue:
- 1-2
- ISSN:
- 0930-7575
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 595-608
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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