PAGES co-sponsors the session
CL21 "Late Holocene climate swings - reconstructions, simulations, socioeconomic impacts", Wednesday, 27 April 2005
Within the IGBP - PAGES programme new initiatives are planned. Initiative 1 aims to better understand regional climate variability. For example, the detailed reconstruction and analysis of regional and global climate variability (mainly air temperature and precipitation) during the last few thousand years is essential. Mainly in central Europe one of the pressing issues is whether the last three warmer and partly drier climate optima during the last 4000 years (Bronze Age Optimum, Iron/Roman Age Optimum, Medieval Climatic Optimum) were warmer than today or not. All three optima were followed by a remarkable cold relapse: Iron Age Cooling, Migration Period Pessimum, Little Ice Age. Some colleagues do not like these expressions because the anomalies are neither spatially nor temporally homogeneous.
Based on reconstructed time series from important natural archives like glaciers, tree rings, pollen, lake levels, sea and lake sediments, stalagmites, boreholes and ice cores as well as documentary proxies the complex spatiotemporal pattern of temperature and precipitation fields is actually being analyzed in many regions of the world. In addition, first long-term model runs with coupled GCM’s or models with intermediate complexity are carried out based on reconstructed forcings (sun, volcanoes, anthropogenic) and can be compared with the archive data. There is a lively interest by many archeologists or archeoclimatologists for these topics.
More PAGES-related Division & Section Programmes:
- Atmospheric Sciences Programme
- Climate Sciences Programme
- Cryospheric Sciences Programme
- Ocean Sciences Programme