The World Data Center for Paleoclimatology features newly archived paleoclimatic data
and climate reconstructions relevant to important issues in paleoclimatology,
plus new services we offer to the scientific community. For a complete listing of
recent data contributions, please click the "most recent ten contributions" link on our
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Please check our archived pages for What's New sections for the years: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, and 1995. What's New for 2009: |
The importance of ship log data: reconstructing North Atlantic,
European and Mediterranean sea level pressure fields back to 1750
Küttel et al. Climate Dynamics Published online 28 April 2009. doi:10.1007/s00382-009-0577-9. Local to regional climate anomalies are to a large extent determined by the state of the atmospheric circulation. The knowledge of large-scale sea level pressure (SLP) variations in former times is therefore crucial when addressing past climate changes across Europe and the Mediterranean. However, currently available SLP reconstructions lack data from the ocean, particularly in the pre-1850 period. Here we present a new statistically-derived 5° x 5° resolved gridded seasonal SLP dataset covering the eastern North Atlantic, Europe and the Mediterranean area (40°W - 50°E; 20°N - 70°N) back to 1750 using terrestrial instrumental pressure series and marine wind information from ship logbooks. For the period 1750-1850, the new SLP reconstruction provides a more accurate representation of the strength of the winter westerlies as well as the location and variability of the Azores High than currently available multiproxy pressure field reconstructions. These findings strongly support the potential of ship logbooks as an important source to determine past circulation variations especially for the pre-1850 period. This new dataset can be further used for dynamical studies relating large-scale atmospheric circulation to temperature and precipitation variability over the Mediterranean and Eurasia, for the comparison with outputs from GCMs as well as for detection and attribution studies. |
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Wind-Driven Upwelling in the Southern Ocean and the Deglacial Rise in Atmospheric CO2
Anderson et al. Science Vol. 323, No. 5920, pp. 1443-1448, 13 March 2009. Wind-driven upwelling in the ocean around Antarctica helps regulate the exchange of carbon dioxide (CO2) between the deep sea and the atmosphere, as well as the supply of dissolved silicon to the euphotic zone of the Southern Ocean. Diatom productivity south of the Antarctic Polar Front and the subsequent burial of biogenic opal in underlying sediments are limited by this silicon supply. We show that opal burial rates, and thus upwelling, were enhanced during the termination of the last ice age in each sector of the Southern Ocean. In the record with the greatest temporal resolution, we find evidence for two intervals of enhanced upwelling concurrent with the two intervals of rising atmospheric CO2 during deglaciation. These results directly link increased ventilation of deep water to the deglacial rise in atmospheric CO2. |
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Persistent Positive North Atlantic Oscillation Mode Dominated the Medieval Climate Anomaly
Trouet et al. Science Vol. 324, No. 5923, pp. 78-80, 3 April 2009. The Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) was the most recent pre-industrial era warm interval of European climate, yet its driving mechanisms remain uncertain. We present here a 947-year-long multidecadal North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) reconstruction and find a persistent positive NAO during the MCA. Supplementary reconstructions based on climate model results and proxy data indicate a clear shift to weaker NAO conditions into the Little Ice Age (LIA). Globally distributed proxy data suggest that this NAO shift is one aspect of a global MCA-LIA climate transition that probably was coupled to prevailing La Niña-like conditions amplified by an intensified Atlantic meridional overturning circulation during the MCA. |
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Paleoenvironments of Bear Lake, Utah and Idaho, and Its Catchment
Geological Society of America Special Paper 450 Bear Lake is located 100 km northeast of Salt Lake City and lies along the course of the Bear River, the largest river in the Great Basin. The lake, which is one of the oldest extant lakes in North America, occupies a tectonically active half-graben and contains hundreds of meters of Quaternary sediment. This volume is the culmination of more than a decade of coordinated investigations aimed at a holistic understanding of this long-lived alkaline lake in the semiarid western United States. Its 14 chapters, with 20 contributing authors, contain geological, mineralogical, geochemical, paleontological, and limnological studies extending from the drainage basin to the depocenter. The studies span both modern and paleoenvironments, including a 120-m-long sediment core that captures a continuous record of the last two glacial-interglacial cycles. |
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NOAA Paleoclimatology Reconstructions Network
NOAA Paleoclimatology has released the first product of its Paleoclimate Network (PCN), including 92 high-resolution temperature records over the past 2+ millennia in its archive. These records include global, hemispheric, regional, and local reconstructions, generally with annual time-step resolution. The records come with many categories of metadata. Each record is available as a separate ASCII file with fixed header and data formats, allowing machine reading of the data and time-step information. All the records together are also available in netCDF, ASCII, and Excel formats, including the complete metadata within the files themselves. |
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Late Holocene Climatic and Environmental Change Inferred from Arctic Lake Sediments
Journal of Paleolimnology Special Volume Volume 41, Number 1, January 2009 The 14 papers in this Special Issue of the Journal of Paleolimnology report new records of Holocene climate and environmental change from Arctic lakes, with emphasis on the last 2000 years. The study sites span the high latitudes of North America and extend into northwestern Europe. The studies rely on multiple proxy indicators to reconstruct past climate, including: varve thicknesses, chironomid, diatom, and pollen assemblages, biogenic-silica and organic-matter content, oxygen-isotope ratios in diatoms, and the frequency of lake-ice-rafted aggregates. These proxies primarily document changes in past summer temperatures, the main control on physical and biological processes in lakes at high latitudes. The records will be integrated into a larger network of paleoclimate sites to investigate the spatial and temporal variability of climate change and to compare the paleoclimate inferences with the output of general circulation models. |
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Declining Coral Calcification on the Great Barrier Reef
De'ath et al. Science Vol. 323, No. 5910, pp. 116-119, 2 January 2009. doi: 10.1126/science.1165283 Reef-building corals are under increasing physiological stress from a changing climate and ocean absorption of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. We investigated 328 colonies of massive Porites corals from 69 reefs of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia. Their skeletal records show that throughout the GBR, calcification has declined by 14.2% since 1990, predominantly because extension (linear growth) has declined by 13.3%. The data suggest that such a severe and sudden decline in calcification is unprecedented in at least the past 400 years. Calcification increases linearly with increasing large-scale sea surface temperature but responds nonlinearly to annual temperature anomalies. The causes of the decline remain unknown; however, this study suggests that increasing temperature stress and a declining saturation state of seawater aragonite may be diminishing the ability of GBR corals to deposit calcium carbonate. |
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http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/whatsnew.html Downloaded Friday, 08-May-2009 03:40:05 EDT Last Updated Tuesday, 05-May-2009 12:49:02 EDT by paleo@noaa.gov Please see the Paleoclimatology Contact Page or the NCDC Contact Page if you have questions or comments. |