Search results for "northern hemisphere"
showing 10 items of 72 documents
The influence of decision-making in tree ring-based climate reconstructions.
2021
Tree-ring chronologies underpin the majority of annually-resolved reconstructions of Common Era climate. However, they are derived using different datasets and techniques, the ramifications of which have hitherto been little explored. Here, we report the results of a double-blind experiment that yielded 15 Northern Hemisphere summer temperature reconstructions from a common network of regional tree-ring width datasets. Taken together as an ensemble, the Common Era reconstruction mean correlates with instrumental temperatures from 1794–2016 CE at 0.79 (p < 0.001), reveals summer cooling in the years following large volcanic eruptions, and exhibits strong warming since the 1980s. Differing in…
Water vapor increase in the northern lower stratosphere by the Asian monsoon anticyclone observed during TACTS/ESMVal campaigns
2017
Abstract. The impact of air masses from Asia influenced by the Asian monsoon anticyclone on the northern hemispheric stratosphere is investigated based on in-situ measurements. An statistical significant increase in water vapor of about 0.5 ppmv (11 %) and methane up to 20 ppbv (1.2 %) in the extra-tropical stratosphere above a potential temperature of 380 K was detected between August and September 2012 by in-situ instrumentation in the northern hemisphere during the HALO aircraft mission TACTS and ESMVal. We investigate the origin of this water vapor and methane increase with the help of the three-dimensional Lagrangian chemistry transport model CLaMS. We assign the source of the moist ai…
Implementation of a comprehensive ice crystal formation parameterization for cirrus and mixed-phase clouds in the EMAC model (based on MESSy 2.53)
2018
A comprehensive ice nucleation parameterization has been implemented in the global chemistry-climate model EMAC to improve the representation of ice crystal number concentrations (ICNCs). The parameterization of Barahona and Nenes (2009, hereafter BN09) allows for the treatment of ice nucleation taking into account the competition for water vapour between homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation in cirrus clouds. Furthermore, the influence of chemically heterogeneous, polydisperse aerosols is considered by applying one of the multiple ice nucleating particle parameterizations which are included in BN09 to compute the heterogeneously formed ice crystals. BN09 has been modified in order to co…
Effect of the Ordovician paleogeography on the (in)stability of the climate.
2014
The Ordovician Period (485–443 Ma) is characterized by abundant evidence for continental-sized ice sheets. Modeling studies published so far require a sharp CO2 drawdown to initiate this glaciation. They mostly used non-dynamic slab mixed-layer ocean models. Here, we use a general circulation model with coupled components for ocean, atmosphere, and sea ice to examine the response of Ordovician climate to changes in CO2 and paleogeography. We conduct experiments for a wide range of CO2 (from 16 to 2 times the preindustrial atmospheric CO2 level (PAL)) and for two continental configurations (at 470 and at 450 Ma) mimicking the Middle and the Late Ordovician conditions. We find that the temper…
El Niño variability off Peru during the last 20,000 years
2005
Here we present a high-resolution marine sediment record from the El Nino region off the coast of Peru spanning the last 20,000 years. Sea surface temperature, photosynthetic pigments, and a lithic proxy for El Nino flood events on the continent are used as paleo–El Nino–Southern Oscillation proxy data. The onset of stronger El Nino activity in Peru started around 17,000 calibrated years before the present, which is later than modeling experiments show but contemporaneous with the Heinrich event 1. Maximum El Nino activity occurred during the early and late Holocene, especially during the second and third millennium B.P. The recurrence period of very strong El Nino events is 60–80 years. El…
Large-scale, millennial-length temperature reconstructions from tree-rings
2018
Supported by the German Science Foundation, grants # Inst 247/665-1 FUGG and ES 161/9-1. SSG acknowledges support by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, KJA by US National Science Foundation grants AGS-1501856 and NSF AGS-1501834, and JL and LS by the Belmont Forum and JPI-Climate, Collaborative Research Action INTEGRATE. Over the past two decades, the dendroclimate community has produced various annually resolved, warm season temperature reconstructions for the extratropical Northern Hemisphere. Here we compare these tree-ring based reconstructions back to 831 CE and present a set of basic metrics to provide guidance for non-specialists on their interpretation and use. We specifically d…
Concord and discord among Northern Hemisphere paleotemperature reconstructions from tree rings
2019
Abstract We review the current generation of large-scale, millennial-length temperature reconstructions derived from tree rings and highlight areas of agreement and disagreement among these state-of-the-art paleotemperature estimates. Although thousands of tree ring-width chronologies are now available from temperate and boreal forest sites across the Northern Hemisphere, only a small fraction of those records are suited as proxies for surface temperature. Maximum latewood density is clearly a superior temperature proxy but is less available, with few densitometric records that are both long and up-to-date. Compared to previous efforts, the newest generation of tree-ring reconstructions cor…
Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia
2013
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…
Cooling and societal change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD
2016
Societal upheaval occurred across Eurasia in the sixth and seventh centuries. Tree-ring reconstructions suggest a period of pronounced cooling during this time associated with several volcanic eruptions. Climatic changes during the first half of the Common Era have been suggested to play a role in societal reorganizations in Europe1,2 and Asia3,4. In particular, the sixth century coincides with rising and falling civilizations1,2,3,4,5,6, pandemics7,8, human migration and political turmoil8,9,10,11,12,13. Our understanding of the magnitude and spatial extent as well as the possible causes and concurrences of climate change during this period is, however, still limited. Here we use tree-ring…
Diverse growth trends and climate responses across Eurasia’s boreal forest
2016
The area covered by boreal forests accounts for similar to 16% of the global and 22% of the Northern Hemisphere landmass. Changes in the productivity and functioning of this circumpolar biome not o ...