Regional Climate of the last 2500 years in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East

The climate of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East is well documented through natural archives, such as speleothems, tree rings, sediments and pollen, as well as historical human records. The period from 500 BCE to 1850 CE is particularly intriguing from both historical and climatic perspectives. This era encompasses the prosperity and decline of the Byzantine and Roman Empires, the Middle Ages, the Little Ice Age, and the onset of industrialization, as well as significant events like plague pandemics and pronounced climate variability. Dynamical downscaling can bridge the gap between palaeo-records, which often contain uncertainties from different sources but may also have very high spatial resolution, and the coarsely resolved Earth System Models (ESMs). A transient paleo-simulation using the regional climate model COSMO-CLM (CCLM, COSMO 5.0 clm16) with adjusted forcings is conducted for the period 500 BCE - 1850 CE to explore potential interactions and feedbacks between climate variability and socio-political and/or economic conditions. The model as well as the driving MPI-ESM-LR incorporates forcing reconstructions based on the framework of the international climate model comparison project CMIP6, including volcanic (stratospheric aerosol optical depth), orbital (eccentricity, obliquity, precession), solar (irradiance), land-use and greenhouse-gas changes. The simulated temperature and precipitation outputs are compared with those of other CMIP6 models and validated against proxy records and reconstructions, enhancing our understanding of climate-society dynamics in this historically pivotal region.