Recent  

The paper present results of cutting edge climate model simulations and reconstructions of volcanic eruption magnitude and timing to better understand the environmental context of the Ptolemaic era (305-30BCE). This important period of Ancient Egyptian history is known for its material and scientific advances, as well as for episodes of political and social unrest.

Understanding future changes in storm surge is key to assessing the sustainability of coastal environment to global warming and sea level rise. Past climate intervals may provide useful insights into how storm surge and sea level extremes may respond to climate forcing conditions. Focusing on the Last Interglacial (LIG, ~127,000 years ago), the study by Scussolini and co-authors applied a novel hydrodynamic modelling framework to simulate changes in sea level extremes caused by storm surges under LIG and pre-industrial climate forcing conditions. They discovered a key role of the meridional position and intensity of predominant wind bands in driving spatial distributions of sea level extremes. Their findings have broad implications for interpretations of LIG sea level from coastal archives.

This paper is providing new data about Southern Hemisphere ice sheet extent and dynamics during glaciations older than those occurring during the last climate cycle, a useful dataset that climate models require to calibrate their own reconstructions.

The manuscript presents a reconstruction of global temperature spanning the Holocene, which extends the scope of previous exercises in palaeoclimate data assimilation. The resulting reconstruction presents new insights into changes in global temperature over this period. Most notably, it confirms the results of previous studies that have shown a global cooling trend over the past 6,000 years. It also shows that a cooling trend is found even after allowing for potential biases in the proxies. These results are likely to be of considerable interest to the broader geoscience community.