Importance of early 19th century volcanic activity on long-term climate variability.

Typically, climate simulations covering the historical period start in 1850, with the first fifty years used as a baseline to represent a ‘pre-industrial' climate. The period immediately prior to 1850 is however of particular interest, as it had far more volcanic activity than any time during the subsequent historical period, and this is known to have caused large cooling of global temperatures. Exploring the climate of this period could help to better understand early anthropogenic warming, natural climate variability and anticipate the response to large future eruptions.

Here we will: (1) highlight the development of a new instrumental observation-based dataset (GloSAT) for temperature variations across the globe from 1781 to present; (2) discuss an ensemble of historical simulations with UKESM1 which were started in 1750, 100 years earlier than typical. These two sources of evidence will be used to identify the long-lasting impacts of the early 19th century volcanism and disentangle it from the response to other forcings and internal variations. Longer term effects of this period are also explored with significant differences found with historical simulations run using the same model initialised in 1850 lasting well into the 20th century. The implications of this discrepancy and the role of large volcanic eruptions on multi-decadal climate will be discussed.