A Review of 2000 Years of Paleoclimatic Evidence in the Mediterranean
[EN] The integration of climate information from instrumental data and documentary and natural archives; evidence of past human activity derived from historical, paleoecological, and archaeological records; and new climate modeling techniques promises major breakthroughs for our understanding of climate sensitivity, ecological processes, environmental response, and human impact. In this chapter, we review the availability and potential of instrumental data, less well-known written records, and terrestrial and marine natural proxy archives for climate in the Mediterranean region over the last 2000 years. We highlight the need to integrate these different proxy archives and the importance for…
The Early Spörer Minimum – A Period of Extraordinary Climate and Socio-economic Changes in Western and Central Europe
Abstract. Throughout the last millennium, mankind was affected by prolonged deviations from the climate mean state. While periods like the Maunder Minimum in the 17th century have been assessed in greater detail, earlier cold periods such as the 15th century received much less attention due to the sparse information available. Based on new evidence from different sources ranging from proxy archives to model simulations, it is now possible to provide an end-to-end assessment about the climate state during an exceptionally cold period in the 15th century, the role of internal, unforced climate variability and external forcing in shaping these extreme climatic conditions, and the impacts on an…
Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia
Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructi…
The 1430s: a cold period of extraordinary internal climate variability during the early Spörer Minimum with social and economic impacts in north-western and central Europe
Changes in climate affected human societies throughout the last millennium. While European cold periods in the 17th and 18th century have been assessed in detail, earlier cold periods received much less attention due to sparse information available. New evidence from proxy archives, historical documentary sources and climate model simulations permit us to provide an interdisciplinary, systematic assessment of an exceptionally cold period in the 15th century. Our assessment includes the role of internal, unforced climate variability and external forcing in shaping extreme climatic conditions and the impacts on and responses of the medieval society in north-western and central Europe. Climate…
Modified climate with long term memory in tree ring proxies
ABSTRACT : A contribution to the PAGES Asia2k Working Group. ABSTRACT: Long term memory (LTM) scaling behavior in worldwide tree ring proxies and subsequent climate reconstructions is analyzed for and compared with the memory structure inherent to instrumental temperature and precipitation data. Detrended fluctuation analysis is employed to detect LTM and its scaling exponent a is used to evaluate LTM. The results show that temperature and precipitation reconstructions based on ring width measurements (mean \alpha =0.8) contain more memory than records based on maximum latewood density (mean \alpha =0.7). Both exceed the memory inherent to regional instrumental data (\alpha =0.6 for tempera…