scholarly journals VARDA (VARved sediments DAtabase) – providing and connecting proxy data from annually laminated lake sediments

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 2311-2332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne Ramisch ◽  
Alexander Brauser ◽  
Mario Dorn ◽  
Cecile Blanchet ◽  
Brian Brademann ◽  
...  

Abstract. Varved lake sediments provide climatic records with seasonal to annual resolution and low associated age uncertainty. Robust and detailed comparison of well-dated and annually laminated sediment records is crucial for reconstructing abrupt and regionally time-transgressive changes as well as validation of spatial and temporal trajectories of past climatic changes. The VARved sediments DAtabase (VARDA) presented here is the first data compilation for varve chronologies and associated palaeoclimatic proxy records. The current version 1.0 allows detailed comparison of published varve records from 95 lakes. VARDA is freely accessible and was created to assess outputs from climate models with high-resolution terrestrial palaeoclimatic proxies. VARDA additionally provides a technical environment that enables us to explore the database of varved lake sediments using a connected data model and can generate a state-of-the-art graphic representation of a multisite comparison. This allows the reassessment of existing chronologies and tephra events to synchronize and compare even distant varved lake records. Furthermore, the present version of VARDA permits the exploration of varve thickness data. In this paper, we report in detail on the data-mining and compilation strategies for the identification of varved lakes and assimilation of high-resolution chronologies, as well as the technical infrastructure of the database. Additional palaeoclimatic proxy data will be provided in forthcoming updates. The VARDA graph database and user interface can be accessed online at https://varve.gfz-potsdam.de (last access: 15 September 2020), all datasets of version 1.0 are available at https://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.4.3.2019.003 (Ramisch et al., 2019).

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne Ramisch ◽  
Alexander Brauser ◽  
Mario Dorn ◽  
Cecile Blanchet ◽  
Brian Brademann ◽  
...  

Abstract. Varved lake sediments provide long climatic records with high temporal resolution and low associated age uncertainty. Robust and detailed comparison of well-dated and annually laminated sediment records is crucial for reconstructing abrupt and regionally time-transgressive changes as well as validation of spatial and temporal trajectories of past climatic changes. The VARved sediments DAtabase (VARDA) presented here is the first data compilation for varve chronologies and associated palaeoclimatic proxy records. The current version 1.0 allows detailed comparison of published varve records from 95 lakes. VARDA is freely accessible and was created to assess outputs from climate models with high-resolution terrestrial palaeoclimatic proxies. VARDA additionally provides a technical environment that enables to explore the database of varved lake sediments using a connected data-model and can generate a state-of-the-art graphic representation of multi-site comparison. This allows to reassess existing chronologies and tephra events to synchronize and compare even distant varved lake records. Furthermore, the present version of VARDA permits to explore varve thickness data. In this paper, we report in detail on the data mining and compilation strategies for the identification of varved lakes and assimilation of high-resolution chronologies as well as the technical infrastructure of the database. Additional paleoclimate proxy data will be provided in forthcoming updates. The VARDA graph-database and user interface can be accessed online at https://varve.gfz-potsdam.de, all datasets of version 1.0 are available at http://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.4.3.2019.003 (Ramisch et al., 2019).


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (9) ◽  
pp. 1345-1360
Author(s):  
Bijan Fallah ◽  
Emmanuele Russo ◽  
Walter Acevedo ◽  
Achille Mauri ◽  
Nico Becker ◽  
...  

Abstract. Data assimilation (DA) methods have been used recently to constrain the climate model forecasts by paleo-proxy records. Both DA and climate models are computationally very expensive. Moreover, in paleo-DA, the time step of consequence for observations is usually too long for a dynamical model to follow the previous analysis state and the chaotic behavior of the model becomes dominant. The majority of recent paleoclimate studies using DA have performed low- or intermediate-resolution global simulations along with an “off-line” DA approach. In an off-line DA, the re-initialization cycle is completely removed after the assimilation step. In this paper, we design a computationally affordable DA to assimilate yearly pseudo-observations and real observations into an ensemble of COSMO-CLM high-resolution regional climate model (RCM) simulations over Europe, for which the ensemble members slightly differ in boundary and initial conditions. Within a perfect model experiment, the performance of the applied DA scheme is evaluated with respect to its sensitivity to the noise levels of pseudo-observations. It was observed that the injected bias in the pseudo-observations linearly impacts the DA skill. Such experiments can serve as a tool for the selection of proxy records, which can potentially reduce the state estimation error when they are assimilated. Additionally, the sensitivity of COSMO-CLM to the boundary conditions is addressed. The geographical regions where the model exhibits high internal variability are identified. Two sets of experiments are conducted by averaging the observations over summer and winter. Furthermore, the effect of the spurious correlations within the observation space is studied and a optimal correlation radius, within which the observations are assumed to be correlated, is detected. Finally, the pollen-based reconstructed quantities at the mid-Holocene are assimilated into the RCM and the performance is evaluated against a test dataset. We conclude that the DA approach is a promising tool for creating high-resolution yearly analysis quantities. The affordable DA method can be applied to efficiently improve climate field reconstruction efforts by combining high-resolution paleoclimate simulations and the available proxy records.


1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Achim Brauer ◽  
Christoph Endres ◽  
Christina Günter ◽  
Thomas Litt ◽  
Martina Stebich ◽  
...  

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrico Scoccimarro ◽  
Silvio Gualdi ◽  
Antonella Sanna ◽  
Edoardo Bucchignani ◽  
Myriam Montesarchio

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 1801-1817 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler C. Sutterley ◽  
Thorsten Markus ◽  
Thomas A. Neumann ◽  
Michiel van den Broeke ◽  
J. Melchior van Wessem ◽  
...  

Abstract. We calculate rates of ice thickness change and bottom melt for ice shelves in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula from a combination of elevation measurements from NASA–CECS Antarctic ice mapping campaigns and NASA Operation IceBridge corrected for oceanic processes from measurements and models, surface velocity measurements from synthetic aperture radar, and high-resolution outputs from regional climate models. The ice thickness change rates are calculated in a Lagrangian reference frame to reduce the effects from advection of sharp vertical features, such as cracks and crevasses, that can saturate Eulerian-derived estimates. We use our method over different ice shelves in Antarctica, which vary in terms of size, repeat coverage from airborne altimetry, and dominant processes governing their recent changes. We find that the Larsen-C Ice Shelf is close to steady state over our observation period with spatial variations in ice thickness largely due to the flux divergence of the shelf. Firn and surface processes are responsible for some short-term variability in ice thickness of the Larsen-C Ice Shelf over the time period. The Wilkins Ice Shelf is sensitive to short-timescale coastal and upper-ocean processes, and basal melt is the dominant contributor to the ice thickness change over the period. At the Pine Island Ice Shelf in the critical region near the grounding zone, we find that ice shelf thickness change rates exceed 40 m yr−1, with the change dominated by strong submarine melting. Regions near the grounding zones of the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves are decreasing in thickness at rates greater than 40 m yr−1, also due to intense basal melt. NASA–CECS Antarctic ice mapping and NASA Operation IceBridge campaigns provide validation datasets for floating ice shelves at moderately high resolution when coregistered using Lagrangian methods.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (12) ◽  
pp. 2617-2632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qifen Yuan ◽  
Thordis L. Thorarinsdottir ◽  
Stein Beldring ◽  
Wai Kwok Wong ◽  
Shaochun Huang ◽  
...  

AbstractIn applications of climate information, coarse-resolution climate projections commonly need to be downscaled to a finer grid. One challenge of this requirement is the modeling of subgrid variability and the spatial and temporal dependence at the finer scale. Here, a postprocessing procedure for temperature projections is proposed that addresses this challenge. The procedure employs statistical bias correction and stochastic downscaling in two steps. In the first step, errors that are related to spatial and temporal features of the first two moments of the temperature distribution at model scale are identified and corrected. Second, residual space–time dependence at the finer scale is analyzed using a statistical model, from which realizations are generated and then combined with an appropriate climate change signal to form the downscaled projection fields. Using a high-resolution observational gridded data product, the proposed approach is applied in a case study in which projections of two regional climate models from the Coordinated Downscaling Experiment–European Domain (EURO-CORDEX) ensemble are bias corrected and downscaled to a 1 km × 1 km grid in the Trøndelag area of Norway. A cross-validation study shows that the proposed procedure generates results that better reflect the marginal distributional properties of the data product and have better consistency in space and time when compared with empirical quantile mapping.


Chemosphere ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 945-956 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Buchert ◽  
S. Bihler ◽  
P. Schott ◽  
H.P. Röper ◽  
H.-J. Pachur ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 673-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoine Colmet-Daage ◽  
Emilia Sanchez-Gomez ◽  
Sophie Ricci ◽  
Cécile Llovel ◽  
Valérie Borrell Estupina ◽  
...  

Abstract. The climate change impact on mean and extreme precipitation events in the northern Mediterranean region is assessed using high-resolution EuroCORDEX and MedCORDEX simulations. The focus is made on three regions, Lez and Aude located in France, and Muga located in northeastern Spain, and eight pairs of global and regional climate models are analyzed with respect to the SAFRAN product. First the model skills are evaluated in terms of bias for the precipitation annual cycle over historical period. Then future changes in extreme precipitation, under two emission scenarios, are estimated through the computation of past/future change coefficients of quantile-ranked model precipitation outputs. Over the 1981–2010 period, the cumulative precipitation is overestimated for most models over the mountainous regions and underestimated over the coastal regions in autumn and higher-order quantile. The ensemble mean and the spread for future period remain unchanged under RCP4.5 scenario and decrease under RCP8.5 scenario. Extreme precipitation events are intensified over the three catchments with a smaller ensemble spread under RCP8.5 revealing more evident changes, especially in the later part of the 21st century.


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