Kevin Anchukaitis | The Past Landscapes Lab

My lab's research program focuses on identifying, understanding, and interpreting forced and unforced variability in the climate system on timescales from extreme events to long-term trends. We develop improved, quantitative, and objective estimates of climatic variability and change -- often using paleoenvironmental proxies, statistical reconstructions, modeling -- to identify and understand both natural and anthropogenic processes and influences on the earth system. Information about the long-term and low-frequency behavior of the climate system, as well as its response to perturbations and its potential range of variability, are necessary for projecting the future response of the climate system to anthropogenic forcing. We also investigate the dynamic response of socio-ecological systems to climate and environmental change across a range of time and spatial scales.

Kevin is also currently the Director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

You can learn more about all the members of our lab on the People page.

Recent News

• Dr. Talia Anderson leads a new paper in the AMS journal Weather, Climate, and Society. She finds highly variable quality of seasonal climate forecasts across the region, with some marginal skill for some metrics. Just as important as these quality issues, however, was that forecasts reached very few farmers in the communities Talia studied. The findings from Talia's paper 'underscore the need for greater engagement and collaboration between forecast providers and end-users throughout the development and dissemination processes for seasonal forecasting to improve the quality and usability of climate information'.
• Ph.D. student Isabel González-Méndez leads a new paper in the AGU journal Earth and Space Sciences, investigating the quality and accuracy of gridded precipitation products in Central America. Isabel took a deep dive into the primary gridded precipitation datasets for Central America, using the original meteorological data (which she painstakingly acquired from all the national meteorological services) to assess quality and potential biases in the derived products from leading research consortia. She finds that the CHIRPS performs best compared to the underlying weather station data, but even in CHIRPS (and other gridded products) there are indications of a bias in rainfall trends especially in eastern Honduras and Nicaragua. Isabel’s careful and innovative approach here reminds us all of the importance of thinking about uncertainties and possible biases even in globally complete gridded data and provides guidance for how best to study climate change and variability in Central America.
• Dr. Julie Edwards leads a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters showing that high-resolution, cellular-scale measurements (from quantitative wood anatomy) capture temperature signals from tree rings better across all frequencies even compared to conventional MXD. She uses these data to build a new summer temperature reconstruction for Alaska over the las millennium.
• Graduate student Alex Saunders tackles an important issue related to climate variable and dataset choices and how these influence the potential success of index insurance in a new paper in Earth's Future.
• Nathan Hwangbo leads a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters developing, testing, and applying a new Bayesian approach to optimal target season selection and climate reconstruction using tree-ring proxies. There's R code associated with the method, too!
• Dr. Talia Anderson leads a new paper in Climatic Change examining the complex set of factors that influence farmers' agricultural adaptation strategies to climate variability and change in the Guatemala's Dry Corridor. This research is part of our NSF-funded investigations into rainfall variability, extreme events, and vulnerability in heterogeneous social and environmental systems.
• Kevin became the new Director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research on July 1, 2025.
• We have a new paper in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences on paleoclimate data assimilation, with a stellar group of early career scientists as coauthors!
• Kira Harris has a new paper in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology! Based on her Master's thesis, her research shows a common mode decadal-scale variability in Gulf of California SSTs and leafwax isotope proxies of the North American Monsoon, likely linked to the Pacific Ocean. Any covariability at other time scales, however, appears to be more complex.
• Julie Edwards has a new 'Tools of the Trade' article about quantitative wood anatomy for Nature Reviews Earth and Environment.
• Isabel González-Méndez has a new paper in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology showing annual ring formation and a summer rainfall climate response in Swietenia macrophylla and Cedrela odorata trees from the Maya lowlands of Guatemala.
• Lab alumna Dr. Julie Edwards leads a new publication in Journal of Geophysical Research showing that quantitative wood anatomy recovers multiple climate signals from Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine chronologies across an elevational gradient.
• Kevin, lab alumnus Dr. Jessie Pearl, and other LTRR colleagues were featured in this Boston Globe article about how tree record climate variability and change, and how in turn they are responding to those changes.
• We have two new NSF-funded projects in the lab! The first from NSF P4CLIMATE will allow us to study the behavior of the ITCZ over the last several centuries using oxygen isotopes in tropical trees from both hemispheres in the Americas. The second is also from NSF's P4CLIMATE and is led by Dr. Karen King at the University of Tennessee. We'll be using the blue intensity tree-ring proxy to reconstruct temperature variability in time and space across North America.
• Congratulations to Dr. Talia Anderson and Dr. Julie Edwards, who defended their dissertations and received their Ph.Ds in summer 2024! Dr. Edwards takes her NSF postdoctoral fellowship to UC Santa Barbara working with Dr. Joan Dudney and Dr. Samantha Stevenson, while Dr. Anderson takes her NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellowship to UCLA and Dr. Karen McKinnon's lab. We miss them already!
• Park Williams leads a new paper in Journal of Geophysical Research where we show, despite some recent wet winters, that the signal of anthropogenic influence on extreme cool season precipitation has not yet emerged in the western United States.