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

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Interactive discussion

Status: closed
Status: closed
AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment
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Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision
ED: Reconsider after major revisions (16 Apr 2016) by Eduardo Zorita
AR by Kira Rehfeld on behalf of the Authors (17 May 2016)  Author's response   Manuscript 
ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (25 May 2016) by Eduardo Zorita
RR by John Williams (09 Nov 2016)
ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by Editor) (10 Nov 2016) by Eduardo Zorita
AR by Kira Rehfeld on behalf of the Authors (26 Nov 2016)  Author's response   Manuscript 
ED: Publish as is (05 Dec 2016) by Eduardo Zorita
AR by Kira Rehfeld on behalf of the Authors (07 Dec 2016)  Manuscript 
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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.