Articles | Volume 12, issue 12
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-12-2255-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-12-2255-2016
Research article
 | 
21 Dec 2016
Research article |  | 21 Dec 2016

Assessing performance and seasonal bias of pollen-based climate reconstructions in a perfect model world

Kira Rehfeld, Mathias Trachsel, Richard J. Telford, and Thomas Laepple

Data sets

Holocene experiment with coupled atmosphere-ocean-model ECHAM5/MPI-OM N. Fischer and J. H. Jungclaus https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.773607

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Short summary
Indirect evidence on past climate comes from the former composition of ecological communities such as plants, preserved as pollen grains in sediments of lakes. Transfer functions convert relative counts of species to a climatologically meaningful scale (e.g. annual mean temperature in degrees C). We show that the fundamental assumptions in the algorithms impact the reconstruction results in he idealized model world, in particular if the reconstructed variables were not ecologically relevant.