Maria Rosabelle Ong

Maria Rosabelle "Ross" Ong focuses on investigating short-term and long term (decadal-to-centennial) scale climate variability and ocean atmosphere interactions through the reconstruction of paleoenvironmental records using geochemical techniques, such as stable isotope and trace metal analysis of carbonates and water.

Her work involves utilizing the geochemistry of slow growing brain corals from the Caribbean to understand how changes in environmental parameters such as sea surface temperature (SST) and sea surface salinity (SSS) interact with climate teleconnections such as the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation in the Common Era. She is currently working on the calibration and reconstruction of SST derived from a new coral species collected from Trinidad and Tobago. Her goal is to better understand the natural variability of the climate and ocean systems and how they have changed in the past, to give a better insight in predicting future climate change.