scholarly journals The Iso2k Database: A global compilation of paleo-δ<sup>18</sup>O and δ<sup>2</sup>H records to aid understanding of Common Era climate

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronwen L. Konecky ◽  
Nicholas P. McKay ◽  
Olga V. Churakova (Sidorova) ◽  
Laia Comas-Bru ◽  
Emilie P. Dassié ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Proxy Records ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Past 2000 Years ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Terrestrial Sediments ◽  
Common Era

Abstract. Reconstructions of global hydroclimate during the Common Era (CE; the past ~ 2000 years) are important for providing context for current and future global environmental change. Stable isotope ratios in water are quantitative indicators of hydroclimate on regional to global scales, and these signals are encoded in a wide range of natural geologic archives. Here we present the Iso2k database, a global compilation of previously published datasets from a variety of natural archives that record the stable oxygen (δ18O) or hydrogen (δ2H) isotopic composition of environmental waters, which reflect hydroclimate changes over the CE. The Iso2k database contains 756 isotope records from the terrestrial and marine realms, including: glacier and ground ice (205); speleothems (68); corals, sclerosponges, and mollusks (145); wood (81); lake sediments and other terrestrial sediments (e.g., loess) (158); and marine sediments (99). Individual datasets have temporal resolutions ranging from sub-annual to centennial, and include chronological data where available. A fundamental feature of the database is its comprehensive metadata, which will assist both experts and non-experts in the interpretation of each record and in data synthesis. Key metadata fields have standardized vocabularies to facilitate comparisons across diverse archives and with climate model simulated fields. This is the first global-scale collection of water isotope proxy records from multiple types of geological and biological archives. It is suitable for evaluating hydroclimate processes through time and space using large-scale synthesis, model-data intercomparison and (paleo)data assimilation. The Iso2k database is available for download at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11553162 (McKay and Konecky, 2020).

scholarly journals The Iso2k database: a global compilation of paleo-<i>δ</i><sup>18</sup>O and <i>δ</i><sup>2</sup>H records to aid understanding of Common Era climate

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 2261-2288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronwen L. Konecky ◽  
Nicholas P. McKay ◽  
Olga V. Churakova (Sidorova) ◽  
Laia Comas-Bru ◽  
Emilie P. Dassié ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Proxy Records ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Past 2000 Years ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Terrestrial Sediments ◽  
Common Era

Abstract. Reconstructions of global hydroclimate during the Common Era (CE; the past ∼2000 years) are important for providing context for current and future global environmental change. Stable isotope ratios in water are quantitative indicators of hydroclimate on regional to global scales, and these signals are encoded in a wide range of natural geologic archives. Here we present the Iso2k database, a global compilation of previously published datasets from a variety of natural archives that record the stable oxygen (δ18O) or hydrogen (δ2H) isotopic compositions of environmental waters, which reflect hydroclimate changes over the CE. The Iso2k database contains 759 isotope records from the terrestrial and marine realms, including glacier and ground ice (210); speleothems (68); corals, sclerosponges, and mollusks (143); wood (81); lake sediments and other terrestrial sediments (e.g., loess) (158); and marine sediments (99). Individual datasets have temporal resolutions ranging from sub-annual to centennial and include chronological data where available. A fundamental feature of the database is its comprehensive metadata, which will assist both experts and nonexperts in the interpretation of each record and in data synthesis. Key metadata fields have standardized vocabularies to facilitate comparisons across diverse archives and with climate-model-simulated fields. This is the first global-scale collection of water isotope proxy records from multiple types of geological and biological archives. It is suitable for evaluating hydroclimate processes through time and space using large-scale synthesis, model–data intercomparison and (paleo)data assimilation. The Iso2k database is available for download at https://doi.org/10.25921/57j8-vs18 (Konecky and McKay, 2020) and is also accessible via the NOAA/WDS Paleo Data landing page: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/29593 (last access: 30 July 2020).

PLANCTation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Amalie Karlsen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Healthcare Professionals ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Female Leadership ◽  
Environmental Benefits ◽  
Oxygen Generation ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Many

‘PLANCTation’ – The story about Aurelia Oline Ebeltoft is a story about how the power and ingenuity of female leadership and large-scale collaboration can help find solutions to the health and existential problems created by severe global environmental change. With a focus on solving air-pollution and its consequences for people’s health and lung function, Aurelia’s invention of PLANCTation – an algae farm for oxygen generation – has given people and planet a new lease on life. Algae farming is, in fact, being increasingly explored for a variety of health and environmental benefits, so this story is incredibly close to some very real developments. Woven into, however, is also a sense of getting fed up with resistance to change and a call to take responsibility, as people and healthcare professionals. To recognize and open ourselves to the many different possibilities to contribute to people’s health and wellbeing and take action.

The Human Dimensions of Global Change

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Liverman ◽  
Brent Yarnal
Keyword(s):  
Global Change ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Human Dimensions ◽  
Water Diversion ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Natural Systems ◽  
Global Environmental

The human–environment condition has emerged as one of the central issues of the new millennium, especially as it has become apparent that human activity is transforming nature at a global scale in both systemic and cumulative ways. Originating with concerns about potential climate warming, the global environmental change agenda rapidly enlarged to include changes in structure and function of the earth’s natural systems, notably those systems critical for life, and the policy implications of these changes, especially focused on the coupled human–environment system. Recognition of the unprecedented pace, magnitude, and spatial scale of global change, and of the pivotal role of humankind in creating and responding to it, has led to the emergence of a worldwide, interdisciplinary effort to understand the human dimensions of global change. The term “global change” now encompasses a range of research issues including those relating to economic, political, and cultural globalization, but in this chapter we limit our focus to global environmental change and to the field that has become formally known as the human dimensions of global (or global environmental) change. We also focus mainly on the work of geographers rather than attempting to review the whole human dimensions research community. Intellectually, geography is well positioned to contribute to global environmental change research (Liverman 1999). The large-scale human transformation of the planet through activities such as agriculture, deforestation, water diversion, fossil fuel use, and urbanization, and the impacts of these on living conditions through changes in, for example, climate and biodiversity, has highlighted the importance of scholarship that analyzes the human–environmental relationship and can inform policy. Geography is one of the few disciplines that has historically claimed human–environment relationships as a definitional component of itself (Glacken 1967; Marsh 1864) and has fostered a belief in and reward system for engaging integrative approaches to problem solving (Golledge 2002; Turner 2002). Moreover, global environmental change is intimately spatial and draws upon geography-led remote sensing and geographic information science (Liverman et al. 1998). Geographers anticipated the emergence of current global change concerns (Thomas et al. 1956; Burton et al. 1978) and were seminal in the development of the multidisciplinary programs of study into the human dimensions of global change.

The SYPR Integrative Assessment Model: Complexity in Development

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Manson
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Land Cover Change ◽  
Integrated Assessment ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Assessment Model ◽  
Integrated Assessment Modeling ◽  
Global Environmental

Be it global environmental change or environment and development, landuse and land-cover change is central to the dynamics and consequences in question in the southern Yucatán peninsular region. Designing policies to address these impacts is hampered by the difficulty of projecting land use and land cover, not only because the dynamics are complex but also because consequences are strongly place-based. This chapter describes an integrated assessment modeling framework that builds on the research detailed in earlier chapters in order to project land-use and land-cover change in a geographically explicit way. Integrated assessment is a term that describes holistic treatments of complex problems to assess both science and policy endeavors in global environmental change (Rotmans and Dowlatabadi 1998). The most common form of integrated assessment is computer modeling that combines socioeconomic and biogeophysical factors to predict global climate. Advanced in part by the successes of these global-scale models, integrated assessment has expanded to structure knowledge and set research priorities for a large range of coupled human–environment problems. Increasing recognition is given to the need for integrated assessment models to address regionalscale problems that are masked by global-scale assessments (Walker 1994). Such models must address two issues to project successfully land-use and land-cover change at the regional scale. First, change occurs incrementally in spatially distinct patterns that have different implications for global change (Lambin 1994). Second, a model must account for the complexity of, and relationships among, socio-economic and environmental factors (B. L. Turner et al. 1995). The SYPR integrated assessment model, therefore, has a fine temporal and spatial grain and it places land-use and landcover change at the intersection of land-manager decision-making, the environment, and socio-economic institutions. What follows is a description of an ongoing integrated assessment modeling endeavor of the SYPR project (henceforth, SYPR IA model). The depth and breadth of the SYPR project poses a challenge to the integrated assessment modeling effort since some unifying framework must reconcile a broad array of issues, theories, and data. The global change research community offers a general conception of how environmental change results from infrastructure development, population pressure, market opportunities, resource institutions, and environmental or resource policies (Stern, Young, and Drukman 1992).

scholarly journals Do Convection-Permitting Regional Climate Models Improve Projections of Future Precipitation Change?

2017 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth J. Kendon ◽  
Nikolina Ban ◽  
Nigel M. Roberts ◽  
Hayley J. Fowler ◽  
Malcolm J. Roberts ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Global Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Models ◽  
Climate Projections ◽  
Convective Storms ◽  
Wide Range

Abstract Regional climate projections are used in a wide range of impact studies, from assessing future flood risk to climate change impacts on food and energy production. These model projections are typically at 12–50-km resolution, providing valuable regional detail but with inherent limitations, in part because of the need to parameterize convection. The first climate change experiments at convection-permitting resolution (kilometer-scale grid spacing) are now available for the United Kingdom; the Alps; Germany; Sydney, Australia; and the western United States. These models give a more realistic representation of convection and are better able to simulate hourly precipitation characteristics that are poorly represented in coarser-resolution climate models. Here we examine these new experiments to determine whether future midlatitude precipitation projections are robust from coarse to higher resolutions, with implications also for the tropics. We find that the explicit representation of the convective storms themselves, only possible in convection-permitting models, is necessary for capturing changes in the intensity and duration of summertime rain on daily and shorter time scales. Other aspects of rainfall change, including changes in seasonal mean precipitation and event occurrence, appear robust across resolutions, and therefore coarse-resolution regional climate models are likely to provide reliable future projections, provided that large-scale changes from the global climate model are reliable. The improved representation of convective storms also has implications for projections of wind, hail, fog, and lightning. We identify a number of impact areas, especially flooding, but also transport and wind energy, for which very high-resolution models may be needed for reliable future assessments.

scholarly journals Cloud Inhomogeneity from MODIS

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (23) ◽  
pp. 5110-5124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lazaros Oreopoulos ◽  
Robert F. Cahalan
Keyword(s):  
Optical Thickness ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Temporal Variations ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Time Of Day ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Level 3 ◽  
Inhomogeneity Parameter ◽  
Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer

Abstract Two full months (July 2003 and January 2004) of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Atmosphere Level-3 data from the Terra and Aqua satellites are analyzed in order to characterize the horizontal variability of vertically integrated cloud optical thickness (“cloud inhomogeneity”) at global scales. The monthly climatology of cloud inhomogeneity is expressed in terms of standard parameters, initially calculated for each day of the month at spatial scales of 1° × 1° and subsequently averaged at monthly, zonal, and global scales. Geographical, diurnal, and seasonal changes of inhomogeneity parameters are examined separately for liquid and ice phases and separately over land and ocean. It is found that cloud inhomogeneity is overall weaker in summer than in winter. For liquid clouds, it is also consistently weaker for local morning than local afternoon and over land than ocean. Cloud inhomogeneity is comparable for liquid and ice clouds on a global scale, but with stronger spatial and temporal variations for the ice phase, and exhibits an average tendency to be weaker for near-overcast or overcast grid points of both phases. Depending on cloud phase, hemisphere, surface type, season, and time of day, hemispheric means of the inhomogeneity parameter ν (roughly the square of the ratio of optical thickness mean to standard deviation) have a wide range of ∼1.7 to 4, while for the inhomogeneity parameter χ (the ratio of the logarithmic to linear mean) the range is from ∼0.65 to 0.8. The results demonstrate that the MODIS Level-3 dataset is suitable for studying various aspects of cloud inhomogeneity and may prove invaluable for validating future cloud schemes in large-scale models capable of predicting subgrid variability.

scholarly journals Plasticity and environmental heterogeneity predict geographic resilience patterns of foundation species to future change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Telesca ◽  
Lloyd S. Peck ◽  
Trystan Sanders ◽  
Jakob Thyrring ◽  
Mikael K. Sejr ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Food Availability ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Multiple Stressors ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Foundation Species ◽  
Organic Layer ◽  
Geographic Patterns ◽  
Global Environmental

ABSTRACTAlthough geographic patterns of species’ sensitivity to global environmental changes are defined by interacting multiple stressors, little is known about the biological mechanisms shaping regional differences in organismal vulnerability. Here, we examine large-scale spatial variations in biomineralisation under heterogeneous environmental gradients of temperature, salinity and food availability across a 30° latitudinal range (3,334 km), to test whether plasticity in calcareous shell production and composition, from juveniles to large adults, mediates geographic patterns of resilience to climate change in critical foundation species, the mussels Mytilus edulis and M. trossulus. We find mussels produced thinner shells with a higher organic content in polar than temperature regions, indicating decreasing shell calcification towards high latitudes. Salinity was the major driver of regional differences in mussel shell deposition, and in shell mineral and organic composition. In low-salinity environments, the production of calcite and organic shell layers was increased, providing higher resistance against dissolution in more corrosive waters. Conversely, under higher-salinity regimes, increased aragonite deposition suggests enhanced mechanical protection from predators. Interacting strong effects of decreasing salinity and increasing food availability on the compositional shell plasticity in polar and subpolar mussels during growth predict the deposition of a thicker external organic layer (periostracum) under forecasted future environmental conditions. This marked response potential of Mytilus species suggests a capacity for increased protection of high-latitude mussel populations from ocean acidification. Our work illustrates that mechanisms driving plastic responses to the spatial structure of multiple stressors can define geographic patterns of unforeseen species resilience to global environmental change.

Examining the respective roles of greenhouse-gas and aerosol forcing for modes of multi-decadal variability

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Dittus ◽  
Ed Hawkins ◽  
Laura Wilcox ◽  
Dan Hodson ◽  
Jon Robson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Greenhouse Gas ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Decadal Variability ◽  
Climate Projections ◽  
Anthropogenic Aerosol ◽  
Multidecadal Variability ◽  
Aerosol Forcing ◽  
Early Results ◽  
Wide Range

&lt;p&gt;The respective roles of aerosol and greenhouse-gas forcing in modulating the phasing and amplitude of large-scale modes of multi-decadal variability remain poorly understood, despite the attention that has been devoted to trying to separate the influence of forcing from internal variability in modes such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Variability and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, for instance. However, understanding what drives multidecadal variability in these basins is imperative for improving near-term climate projections.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here, we show how aerosol and greenhouse-gas forcing interact with internal climate variability to generate indices of multi-decadal variability in the Atlantic, using a large ensemble of historical simulations with HadGEM3-GC3.1 for the period 1850-2014, where anthropogenic aerosol emissions are scaled to sample a wide range in historical aerosol forcing. These results are complemented by early results from new stabilised warming simulations with the same climate model and analysis of future projections from models partaking in the Sixth Phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6).&lt;/p&gt;

scholarly journals Evaluating the hydrological consistency of satellite based water cycle components

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver López ◽  
Rasmus Houborg ◽  
Matthew F. McCabe
Keyword(s):  
Land Surface ◽  
Water Budget ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Water Cycle ◽  
Satellite Observation ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Satellite Observations ◽  
Arid Environments ◽  
Basin Scale ◽  
Wide Range

Abstract. Advances in multi-satellite based observations of the earth system have provided the capacity to retrieve information across a wide-range of land surface hydrological components and provided an opportunity to characterize terrestrial processes from a completely new perspective. Given the spatial advantage that space-based observations offer, several regional-to-global scale products have been developed, offering insights into the multi-scale behaviour and variability of hydrological states and fluxes. However, one of the key challenges in the use of satellite-based products is characterizing the degree to which they provide realistic and representative estimates of the underlying retrieval: that is, how accurate are the hydrological components derived from satellite observations? The challenge is intrinsically linked to issues of scale, since the availability of high-quality in-situ data is limited, and even where it does exist, is generally not commensurate to the resolution of the satellite observation. Basin-scale studies have shown considerable variability in achieving water budget closure with any degree of accuracy using satellite estimates of the water cycle. In order to assess the suitability of this type of approach for evaluating hydrological observations, it makes sense to first test it over environments with restricted hydrological inputs, before applying it to more hydrological complex basins. Here we explore the concept of hydrological consistency, i.e. the physical considerations that the water budget impose on the hydrologic fluxes and states to be temporally and spatially linked, to evaluate the reproduction of a set of large-scale evaporation (E) products by using a combination of satellite rainfall (P) and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) observations of storage change, focusing on arid and semi-arid environments, where the hydrological flows can be more realistically described. Our results indicate no persistent hydrological consistency in these environments, suggesting the need for continued efforts in improving satellite observations, particularly for the retrieval of evaporation, and the need to more directly account for anthropogenic influences such as agricultural irrigation into our large scale water cycle studies.

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