Past climate and environmental data provide critical tests of global and regional climate models. While there are a small number of high-profile records, such as the Greenland ice cores, which are critical for informing on the dynamic nature of past climate change, determining the nature of regional to local scale climate impacts is key to understanding the complexities of climate change. Terrestrial records (lakes, speleothems, peat, etc.) provide valuable information on how local or regional climate conditions changed and – in some cases – how local ecosystems responded to the changes. However, integrating various types of terrestrial together and/or along with marine records in a regional paleoclimate study hampers a deeper understanding of the processes and feedbacks active in the climate system. For example, when records from neighbouring locations are precisely compared, it is possible to identify possible leads and lags between the records and to set up time lines of events for past periods of climate change. Time lines like these are of important to understand the dynamics of the climate system because they are the starting points for making hypotheses about not only the dynamics, but the mechanisms, of past climate change, adding to our understanding of the ice-sea-atmosphere interactions and feedbacks during periods of abrupt and extreme change. A invited speaker in the field of paleoclimatology and from the INTIMATE network, Prof. Achim Brauer, will provide :
i) a general overview on how various terrestrial records in a regional paleoclimate study are generally integrated,
ii) what are the common problems generated from an integrated paleoclimate study : interpretation of proxy data, disentangling different climate signals, temporal sensitivity of proxies to climatic change, the value of qualitative terms.
iii) solutions proposed such as the establishment of protocols for comparing records based upon precise chronologies, statistical tools for comparing records on related timescales and new methods for incorporating temporal uncertainties involved in inter-site correlations.
This introductory short course is addressed to all scientists involved in paleoclimate research and using various types of records. Registration is not needed, but indication of interest would be helpful for planning purposes