Articles | Volume 16, issue 4
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-16-1581-2020
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-16-1581-2020
Research article
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25 Aug 2020
Research article | Highlight paper |  | 25 Aug 2020

Climatic information archived in ice cores: impact of intermittency and diffusion on the recorded isotopic signal in Antarctica

Mathieu Casado, Thomas Münch, and Thomas Laepple

Model code and software

Virtual firn core generator Mathieu Casado, Thomas Münch, and Thomas Laepple https://fr.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/77095-virtual-firn-core-generator?s_tid=prof_contriblnk

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Short summary
The isotopic composition in ice cores from Antarctica is usually interpreted as a temperature proxy. Using a forward model, we show how different the signal in ice cores and the actual climatic signal are. Precipitation intermittency and diffusion do indeed affect the archived signal, leading to the reshuffling of the signal which limits the ability to reconstruct high-resolution climatic variations with ice cores.