The major objective of this workshop was to investigate the spatio-temporal pattern of Holocene climate changes as derived from transient integrations with climate models of different complexity; from comprehensive global climate models to models of intermediate complexity and statistical-conceptual models.
For the 23 participants from Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland and Norway, this was the first step in comparing data with models and may develop into a benchmark for models used in the assessment of future climate change. The Priority Research Program “Integrated analysis of interglacial climate dynamics” (INTERDYNAMIC; www.interdynamik.de; funded by the German Research Foundation; Schulz and Paul, 2009) formed the framework for the workshop.
INTERDYNAMIC is based on an integrated approach in paleoclimate research, in which all available paleoclimate archives are combined with results from Earth System models to gain insights into the dynamics of climate variations during interglacials.