Recent  

This article presents FYRE Climate, a dataset providing daily precipitation and temperature spanning the 1871–2012 period at 8 km resolution over France. FYRE Climate has been obtained through the combination of daily and yearly observations and a gridded reconstruction already available through a statistical technique called data assimilation. Results highlight the quality of FYRE Climate in terms of both long-term variations and reproduction of extreme events.

Here we reconstruct the rate of snow accumulation during the Last Interglacial period in an East Antarctic ice core located near the present-day northern edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. We find an order-of-magnitude increase in the accumulation rate during the peak warming in the Last Interglacial. This large increase in mass accumulation is compatible with less ice cover in the Ross Sea, perhaps created by a partly collapsed West Antarctic Ice Sheet, whose stability in a warming world is uncertain.

This study investigates the reliability of paleo-reconstructions of the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) using climate model data. We find that reconstructions are able to capture ~ 60 % of the SAM variability at best, with poorer reconstructions managing only 35 %. Reconstructions perform best when they use more proxies sourced from the entire Southern Hemisphere land mass. Future reconstructions should endeavour to address both sampling and proxy–SAM correlation stability uncertainties.

We present preliminary analyses of the annual sea salt concentrations and snowfall accumulation in a new East Antarctic ice core, Mount Brown South. We compare this record with an updated Law Dome (Dome Summit South site) ice core record over the period 1975–2016. The Mount Brown South record preserves a stronger and inverse signal for the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (in austral winter and spring) compared to the Law Dome record (in summer).

The mid-Pliocene Warm Period (~ 3.2 Ma) is often considered an analogue for near-future climate projections, and model results from the PlioMIP2 ensemble show an increase of rainfall over West Africa and the Sahara region compared to pre-industrial conditions. Though previous studies of future projections show a west–east drying–wetting contrast over the Sahel, these results indicate a uniform rainfall increase over the Sahel in warm climates characterized by increased greenhouse gas forcing.

Greenland ice core data show that the last glacial cycle was punctuated by a series of abrupt climate shifts comprising significant warming over Greenland, retreat of North Atlantic sea ice, and atmospheric reorganization. Statistical analysis of multi-proxy records reveals no systematic lead or lag between the transitions of proxies that represent different climatic subsystems, and hence no evidence for a potential trigger of these so-called Dansgaard–Oeschger events can be found.

To study the interaction of the westerlies and Indian summer monsoon (ISM) during the Holocene, we used paleoenvironmental reconstructions using a sediment core from the northeast Arabian Sea. We found a climatic transition period between 4.6 and 3 ka BP during which the ISM shifted southwards and the influence of Westerlies became prominent. Our data indicate a stronger influence of agriculture activities and enhanced soil erosion, adding to Bond event impact after this transition period.

This paper stresses the original contributions of Milankovitch related to his caloric seasons and his climate model giving the caloric seasons a climatological meaning.

We assess the ¹⁴C plateau tuning technique used to date marine sediments and determine ¹⁴C marine reservoir ages. We identify problems linked to assumptions of the technique, the assumed shapes of the ¹⁴C / ¹²C records, and the sparsity and uncertainties in both atmospheric and marine data. Our concerns are supported with carbon cycle box model experiments and statistical simulations, allowing us to question the ability to tune ¹⁴C age plateaus in the context of noisy and sparse data.

For the first time an isotope-enabled regional climate simulation for Greenland is performed for the mid-Holocene. Simulation results are compared with observed isotope ratios in ice cores. Compared to global climate simulations, a regional downscaling improves the agreement with measured isotope concentrations. Thus, an isotope-enabled regional climate simulation constitutes a useful supplement to reconstruct regional paleo-climate conditions during the mid-Holocene in Greenland.

We investigate the impact of explicitly resolving convection on the mid-Holocene West African Monsoon rain belt by employing the ICON climate model in high resolution. While the spatial distribution and intensity of the precipitation are improved by this technique, the monsoon extents further north and the mean summer rainfall is higher in the simulation with parameterized convection.

Regional climate simulations were constructed to more accurately capture regional features of the South and Southeast Asian monsoon during the mid-Holocene. Comparison with proxies shows that our high-resolution simulations outperform those with the coarser global model in reproducing the monsoon rainfall anomalies. Incorporating the Green Sahara climate conditions over northern Africa into our simulations further strengthens the monsoon precipitation and leads to better agreement with proxies.

Using ancient gas trapped in polar glaciers, we reconstructed the atmospheric concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide over the penultimate deglaciation to study their response to major climate changes. We show this deglaciation to be characterized by modes of methane and nitrous oxide variability that are also found during the last deglaciation and glacial cycle.

This study investigates the coupling of climate and the carbon and hydrologic cycles in Asia ~ 113 million years ago to provide a more complete continental perspective on a dynamic climate interval associated with global ocean anoxic events. We find relatively cool conditions and a close coupling between the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, air temperature and rainfall in Asia. To quantify these shifts, chemical measurements from continental soils which formed during this interval are utilized.

We analyse Holocene climate model simulation data to find the locations of Antarctic ice cores which are best suited to reconstruct local- to regional-scale temperatures. We find that the spatial decorrelation scales of the temperature variations and of the noise from precipitation intermittency set an effective sampling length scale. Following this, a single core should be located at the target site for the temperature reconstruction, and a second one optimally lies more than 500 km away.

This study presents a multi-proxy record from Lake Voёlvlei and provides new insights into the sea level and paleoclimate history of the past 8.5 ka at South Africa’s southern Cape coast. Our results show that sea level changes at the southern coast are in good agreement with the western coast of South Africa. In terms of climate our record provides valuable insights into changing sources of precipitation at the southern Cape coast, i.e. westerly- and easterly-derived precipitation contribution.