UAlbany researcher partners on $1.2 million NSF grant to explore tropical monsoon rainfall patterns

(Press-News.org) ALBANY, N.Y. (Oct. 30, 2025) — A University at Albany researcher is teaming up with scientists from five institutions on a $1.2 million National Science Foundation project to better understand monsoon rainfall patterns across Asia, Indonesia and Australia over the last millennium — and how they might look in the future under a changing climate.

For decades, scientists have studied natural records around the Eastern Hemisphere tropics to reconstruct past changes in monsoon rainfall. These records, which include stalagmites, corals, lake sediments, and tree rings, help track how and when monsoon rains changed over the past decades and centuries. The new grant provides the opportunity to integrate all of these records together.

Sujata Murty, an assistant professor in UAlbany’s Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, is among six researchers leading the project.

“Climate records from individual stalagmite, coral, lake or tree ring sites are a great first step in understanding climate change for a specific site,” Murty said. “Combining the perspective of all sites together, on the other hand, allows us to take a step back and examine the bigger picture.”

“This project is an exciting opportunity to bring together an expansive network of scientists across all career stages to leverage paleoclimate, oceanographic, atmospheric and climate modeling perspectives.”

Coral Clues to Climate Change

The Australian, Maritime Continent and South Asian summer monsoons provide the majority of freshwater for the billions of people in the Eastern Hemisphere tropics, impacting about 40 percent of the global population.

Yet many of these regions, especially the Southern Hemisphere, are data sparse, which limits the ability to understand how the monsoon systems have changed in the past and to predict how they will change in the future.

Murty is an oceanographer who collects and analyzes coral samples. Corals have annual growth layers, similar to tree rings, that can offer valuable information on how environmental conditions have changed over time, along with insight for future climate modeling.

For this project, Murty will use a public database (which she helped create) of coral records that span the Indian Ocean, Maritime Continent and Pacific Ocean. Her analysis will focus on how monsoon precipitation has changed spatially over time, and what aspects of our climate system are driving those changes.

“This research is exciting because it allows me to take the next steps with my coral paleoclimate research,” said Murty, who co-directs UAlbany’s Paleoclimate Lab. “With this project, we are leveraging the growing number of published records from the entire coral paleoclimate research community to better understand global changes in our monsoon systems.”

Once the research team has assembled and integrated the data from all of the natural records, they’ll link everything together using climate models. Their hope is to better understand the mechanisms driving changes in monsoon rainfall patterns over the last 1,000 years, from medieval times before human-driven climate change, up to present day.  

“Our findings will improve decadal predictions, climate projections and risk management for societies in this region that are highly vulnerable to climate change,” Murty said.

Training Future Climate Scientists 

Beyond research, the grant will fund 17 undergraduate student researchers from the partnering institutions, UAlbany, Cornell College, Iowa State University, University of New Mexico, Occidental College and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

UAlbany students will assist Murty in compiling and analyzing coral data and explore techniques to understand past changes in the behavior across the Australian to Asian monsoon systems.

The project research team is also partnering with Nord Anglia Education to deliver age-appropriate science presentations to K-12 students in Iowa, Los Angeles, Albuquerque and northern Australia, and will directly engage with university students and faculty in the Philippines, Nepal and Australia.

END