Abstract. The improvement in resolution of climate models is always been mentioned as one of the most important factors when investigating past climatic conditions especially in order to evaluate and compare the results against proxy data. In this paper we present for the first time a set of high resolution simulations for different time slices of mid-to-late Holocene performed over Europe using a Regional Climate Model. Through a validation against a new pollen-based climate reconstructions dataset, covering almost all of Europe, we test the model performances for paleoclimatic applications and investigate the response of temperature to variations in the seasonal cycle of insolation, with the aim of clarifying earlier debated uncertainties, giving physically plausible interpretations of both the pollen data and the model results. The results reinforce previous findings showing that summertime temperatures were driven mainly by changes in insolation and that the model is too sensitive to such changes over Southern Europe, resulting in drier and warmer conditions. In winter, instead, the model does not reproduce correctly the same amplitude of changes, even if it captures the main pattern of the pollen dataset over most of the domain for the time periods under investigation. Through the analysis of variations in atmospheric circulation we suggest that, even though in some areas the discrepancies between the two datasets are most likely due to high pollen uncertanties, in general the model seems to underestimate the changes in the amplitude of the North Atlantic Oscillation, overestimating the contribution of secondary modes of variability
Supplementary material to "Climate reconstructions based on GDGT and pollen surface datasets
from Mongolia and Siberia: calibrations and applicability to
extremely cold-dry environments over the Late Holocene"
