Interglacials are largely viewed as “stable” climate states relative to glacial periods. However, several abrupt and continental scale changes during interglacials have occurred despite relatively weak climatic forcings. This raises an important question: if the relatively weak forcings during interglacials can facilitate these large climatic shifts, then how well do we understand the geologic, hydrologic, and climatic sensitivities to ‘natural’ climate changes and how might this manifest heading into the future? Interglacials, therefore, provide useful empirical examples of change in natural resources (e.g. water) and ecosystem responses in a warm world.

This session invites contributions from both proxy- and climate model based approaches that focus on a better understanding of interglacial climates on millennial and sub-millennial time scales. Our session aims to deepen our understanding of the Earth system processes responsible for abrupt temperature and moisture changes during interglacials. We welcome contributions that will provide insight into interglacial climate change such as large data syntheses, paleoclimate reconstructions, geochemical records, improving paleo-proxy uncertainty, data-model comparisons or disparities, explorations of seasonal biases in proxy data, data assimilation into Earth system models, and climate model sensitivity studies. Talks in this session will highlight the need for coordinated study of the Earth System over interglacials to provide useful observations that can isolate the mechanisms responsible for abrupt shifts and climatic variability in a warm world.