References

Climate of the Past

Clim. Past

1814-9332

Copernicus Publications

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/cp-10-1633-2014

Last interglacial model–data mismatch of thermal maximum temperatures partially explained

Bakker

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6249-0162

¹ ² Renssen

Earth and Climate Cluster, Department of Earth Sciences, VU University Amsterdam, 1081HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands

now at: College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

29 08 2014

10 4 1633 1644

2014

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This article is available from https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/10/1633/2014/cp-10-1633-2014.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/10/1633/2014/cp-10-1633-2014.pdf

The timing of the last interglacial (LIG) thermal maximum across the globe remains to be precisely assessed. Because of difficulties in establishing a common temporal framework between records from different palaeoclimatic archives retrieved from various places around the globe, it has not yet been possible to reconstruct spatio-temporal variations in the occurrence of the maximum warmth across the globe. Instead, snapshot reconstructions of warmest LIG conditions have been presented, which have an underlying assumption that maximum warmth occurred synchronously everywhere. Although known to be an oversimplification, the impact of this assumption on temperature estimates has yet to be assessed. We use the LIG temperature evolutions simulated by nine different climate models to investigate whether the assumption of synchronicity results in a sizeable overestimation of the LIG thermal maximum. We find that for annual temperatures, the overestimation is small, strongly model-dependent (global mean 0.4 ± 0.3 °C) and cannot explain the recently published 0.67 °C difference between simulated and reconstructed annual mean temperatures during the LIG thermal maximum. However, if one takes into consideration that temperature proxies are possibly biased towards summer, the overestimation of the LIG thermal maximum based on warmest month temperatures is non-negligible with a global mean of 1.1 ± 0.4 °C.

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