Periodicity of the Southern Annular Mode in Southern Patagonia, insight from the Lago Argentino varve record

Climatic variability across a large fraction of the Southern Hemisphere is controlled by the Southern Annular Mode and associated latitudinal shifts in the Southern Westerly Wind belt. In Patagonia, these changes control the large-scale temperature and precipitation trends – and resulting glacier surface mass balance. Our understanding of recent changes in this climatic oscillation is, however, limited by the number of paleo-environmental records in the mid to high-latitude Southern Hemisphere. Here, we first use a synthetic proxy record to demonstrate that periodicity may be preserved in a wider range of records than can be used for quantitative paleoclimatic reconstructions. We then analyze a 5000-year-long sedimentation record derived from Lago Argentino, a 1500 km2 ice-contact lake in Southern Patagonia. We extract a mass accumulation rate and greyscale pixel intensity record from 28 cores across all of Lago Argentino's main depositional environments. We align the mass accumulation rate and pixel intensity records to a common time axis through multivariate dynamic-time-warping, and investigate their spectral properties using the multi-taper Lomb Scargle periodogram. We find statistically significant spectral peaks at 200 ± 20, 150 ± 16, and 85 ± 9 years in two thirds of mass accumulation rate and one third of the pixel intensity records. These periodicities reveal the centennial periodicity of the Southern Annular Mode, which is the key climatic driver of sedimentation at Lago Argentino. •We use a large dataset of varved lake cores from Lago Argentino, to investigate the periodicity of the Southern Annular Mode.•We use a synthetic proxy signal to demonstrate that periodicity may be preserved in a wide range of scenarios.•We identify three statistically significant periodicities at 200 ± 20, 150 ± 16, and 85 ± 9 years.•The results of our study provide a baseline for understanding present-day climatic changes in Southern Patagonia.