Articles | Volume 21, issue 7
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-21-1185-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-21-1185-2025
Research article
 | 
10 Jul 2025
Research article |  | 10 Jul 2025

More is not always better: delta-downscaling climate model outputs from 30 to 5 min resolution has minimal impact on coherence with Late Quaternary proxies

Lucy Timbrell, James Blinkhorn, Margherita Colucci, Michela Leonardi, Manuel Chevalier, Andrea Vittorio Pozzi, Matt Grove, Eleanor Scerri, and Andrea Manica

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Cited articles

Armstrong, E., Hopcroft, P. O., and Valdes, P. J.: A simulated Northern Hemisphere terrestrial climate dataset for the past 60000 years, Sci. Data, 6, 265, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-019-0277-1, 2019. 
Barreto, E., Holden, P. B., Edwards, N. R., and Rangel, T. F.: PALEO-PGEM-Series: A spatial time series of the global climate over the last 5 million years (Plio-Pleistocene), Global Ecol. Biogeogr., 32, 1034–1045, https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13683, 2023. 
Beyer, R. M., Krapp, M., and Manica, A.: High-resolution terrestrial climate, bioclimate and vegetation for the last 120,000 years, Sci. Data, 7, 236, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0552-1, 2020a. 
Beyer, R., Krapp, M., and Manica, A.: An empirical evaluation of bias correction methods for palaeoclimate simulations, Clim. Past, 16, 1493–1508, https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-16-1493-2020, 2020b. 
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Scientists study past climate change using proxies (e.g. pollen) and models. Proxies offer detailed snapshots but are limited in number, while models provide broader coverage but at low resolution. Models are typically downscaled to 30 arcmin, but it is unclear if this is sufficient. We found that increasing models to 5 arcmin does not improve their coherence with climate reconstructed from pollen data. Optimal model resolution depends on research need, balancing detail with error.

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