Proxy records from the arid mid-latitudes tend to show complicated responses to forcing. Sensitive to changes at both high and low latitudes and often characterized by dry landscapes with limited preservation potential of archives, records tend to be fragmentary and characterised by strong regional differences. Consequently, understanding how mid-latitude changes reflect, amplify or cause changes elsewhere is very primitive. Ironically, this is despite the mid latitudes arid zones being the biggest dust producers on Earth. This dust drives global-scale changes in the climate system, and is used to synchronise records (esp. ice cores). Any teleconnection between high and low latitudes must be transmitted through mid-latitudes zones, making them especially sensitive to changes within and between the hemispheres. Equally challenging and important to understand, the tendency towards incomplete records means that these regions force us to combine evidence from lakes, soils, marine cores, speleothems, loess and far-field sea-level changes to build a synthetic understanding of the regional expression of global changes.

To help build the community effort needed to solve the mid-latitude problem, we invite contributions presenting proxy records from around 20 – 40 degrees latitude in both hemispheres, e.g., Australia, north and south Africa, southern North America, southern South America, southwest and central Asia, southern Europe, northern India and southern China / Vietnam. The contribution should address themes that unify these regions: the balance of aridity and humidity, correlation and chronology, precession forcing, relationships to global forcing and methodologies for extracting useful information from incomplete records.