Sea surface temperature and paleo-El Niño events in Santa Barbara Basin, AD 1841-1941

Like pages of a "natural coastal diary", successive layers of anoxic varved sediment in the central Santa Barbara Basin have been used by paleoceanographers to reconstruct aspects of past coastal climate. This report focuses on the end of the "Little Ice Age" (15th to 19th century) and on the beginning of this century, a period known to encompass extreme climate excursions and weather events in the Santa Barbara Basin and other parts of Southern California. El Niño events are known to disrupt Southern California's coastal ecosystems and to cause anomalous weather conditions, but El Niño events in Southern California before 1990 have been largely undocumented.