Climate of the Past
Climate of the Past
CP
Articles | Volume 18, issue 12
Articles | Volume 18, issue 12
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-18-2599-2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-18-2599-2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Articles | Volume 18, issue 12
Research article
 | Highlight paper
 | 
15 Dec 2022
Research article | Highlight paper |  | 15 Dec 2022

Reconstructing Holocene temperatures in time and space using paleoclimate data assimilation

Michael P. Erb, Nicholas P. McKay, Nathan Steiger, Sylvia Dee, Chris Hancock, Ruza F. Ivanovic, Lauren J. Gregoire, and Paul Valdes

Data sets

Holocene temperature reconstruction using paleoclimate data assimilation M. P. Erb, N. P. McKay, N. Steiger, S. Dee, C. Hancock, R. F. Ivanovic, L. J. Gregoire, and P. Valdes https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6426332

Holocene Reconstruction: Model and proxy data for running code (v1.0.0) M. P. Erb, N. P. McKay, N. Steiger, S. Dee, C. Hancock, R. F. Ivanovic, L. J. Gregoire, and P. Valdes https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7407116

Model code and software

Holocene reconstruction code M. P. Erb, N. P. McKay, N. Steiger, S. Dee, C. Hancock, R. F. Ivanovic, L. J. Gregoire, and P. Valdes https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7419527

Holocene-Reconstruction/Holocene-code M. P. Erb https://github.com/Holocene-Reconstruction/Holocene-code

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Co-editor-in-chief
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.
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Short summary
To look at climate over the past 12 000 years, we reconstruct spatial temperature using natural climate archives and information from model simulations. Our results show mild global mean warmth around 6000 years ago, which differs somewhat from past reconstructions. Undiagnosed seasonal biases in the data could explain some of the observed temperature change, but this still would not explain the large difference between many reconstructions and climate models over this period.
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