Europe and its adjacent areas are rich in climate data sources that can be employed to resolve and better understand climate variability over the past millennium. Data sources include: long instrumental series, documentary evidence and highly resolved natural palaeoclimatic proxies. Despite the fact that there are many proxy data available, uncertainties on climate reconstructions of the past millennium increase back in time. In addition to this a comprehensive picture of the availability of relevant sources for climate reconstruction, including records of extreme events, has not yet been obtained, despite the efforts of a number of EU international and national projects. Improving the quality and coverage of proxy and documentary information is of special relevance in areas that exhibit possible sensitivity to climate change. Such improvements may contribute to a better understanding and modelling of past climate in the region. In order to increase reconstruction skill in time and space and to expand climate estimates further back in time, the spatio-temporal coverage of high quality, accurately dated, natural and documentary proxy evidence needs to be improved. An additional source of information about past climate variability is provided by climate model simulations. The analysis of model response to external forcing, changes in atmosphere and ocean mechanisms contributing to natural climate variability as well of comparisons between model and proxy data help to improve our understanding of past multi-century climate variability.

The session invites papers and posters related to
• Instrumental, documentary and natural proxy data sources and their potential for climate reconstructions;
• Methods of climate reconstruction combining instrumental, documentary and natural proxies;
Evaluation of uncertainties and error estimates in climate reconstruction;
• Local, regional, hemispheric and global climate reconstructions;
• Changes of natural and anthropogenic forcings and their manifestation in climate reconstructions;
• Evaluation of reconstruction methods using climate model simulations;
• Comparison of climate reconstructions with climate model simulations.