Davin Wallace
University of Southern Mississippi, MS·Earth & Environmental Science
Tropical cyclones, known regionally as typhoons or hurricanes, are intense storms born over warm tropical oceans that wreck buildings and take lives. The western North Pacific sees more of them than anywhere on Earth, roughly 40 storms a year, yet instruments have recorded them for only about 75 years.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
tropical cyclones
typhoons
hurricanes
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Collect seismic, multibeam and sediment core data from deep coastal depressions across the Philippines, Palau, Guam, Chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae to recover millennial records of intense tropical cyclone strikes.
- Identify storm-deposited layers in the cores using grain-size distribution, loss on ignition, X-ray fluorescence scanning, computed tomography, petrography and fossil analysis, calibrated against modern sedimentary analogs.
- Date storm layers with short-lived isotopes and radiocarbon ages in a Bayesian framework, then derive recurrence rate estimates and assess variations in storm activity on sub-millennial timescales.
More about the research
That short window cannot reveal how often the strongest storms strike or how climate governs them. This collaborative project aims to push the storm record back several thousand years using sediments laid down along coastlines.
Why it matters
Island and coastal communities across the western North Pacific, including the Philippines, Guam and Micronesia, face the world's most frequent tropical cyclones while relying on only decades of instrumental data. Records spanning millennia could sharpen estimates of how often intense storms return and clarify which climate factors drive storm frequency, intensity and track, informing hazard assessment for these regions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lowell Stott
University of Southern California, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Collect sediment cores from high-sedimentation-rate sites in the deep western North Pacific during a research cruise to fill a major data gap.
Bronwen Konecky
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Reconstruct 10,000 years of Holocene rainfall and vegetation in Central America and northern South America by measuring hydrogen isotopes of leaf waxes in six dated lake cores from Guatemala and Venezuela.
Gary Stinchcomb
University of Memphis, TN·Earth & Environmental Science
Map plant-essential nutrients such as phosphorus, calcium and potassium in modern and fossil soils using micro X-ray fluorescence (µ-XRF), a nondestructive X-ray chemical imaging method.
The school
University of Southern Mississippi: 3 labs on PI Pages, $94M a year on research, 362 research doctorates a year.
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