2010

1. [Ammann et al. 2010]
   Abstract. Regression-based climate reconstructions scale one or more noisy proxy records against a (generally) short instrumental data series. Based on that relationship, the indirect information is then used to estimate that particular measure of climate back in time. A well-calibrated proxy record(s), if stationary in its relationship to the target, should faithfully preserve the mean amplitude of the climatic variable. However, it is well established in the statistical literature that traditional regression parameter estimation can lead to substantial amplitude attenuation if the predictors carry significant amounts of noise. This issue is known as Measurement Error  (Fuller, 1987; Carroll et al., 2006). Climate proxies derived from tree-rings, ice cores, lake sediments, etc., are inherently noisy and thus all regression-based reconstructions could suffer from this problem. Some recent applications attempt to ward off amplitude attenuation, but implementations are often complex (Lee et al., 2008) or require additional information, e.g. from climate models (Hegerl et al., 2006, 2007). Here we explain the cause of the problem and propose an easy, generally applicable, data-driven strategy to effectively correct for attenuation (Fuller, 1987; Carroll et al., 2006), even at annual resolution. The impact is illustrated in the context of a Northern Hemisphere mean temperature reconstruction. An inescapable trade-off for achieving an unbiased reconstruction is an increase in variance, but for many climate applications the change in mean is a core interest.
   Climate reconstruction, attenuation in variability

2. [Buckley et al. 2010]
   The hydraulic city of Angkor, the capitol of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia, experienced decades-long drought interspersed with intense monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that, in combination with other factors, contributed to its eventual demise. The climatic evidence comes from a seven-and-a-half cen- tury robust hydroclimate reconstruction from tropical southern Vietnamese tree rings. The Angkor droughts were of a duration and severity that would have impacted the sprawling city’s water supply and agricultural productivity, while high-magnitude mon- soon years damaged its water control infrastructure. Hydroclimate variability for this region is strongly and inversely correlated with tropical Pacific sea surface temperature, indicating that a warm Pacific and El Niño events induce drought at interannual and inter- decadal time scales, and that low-frequency variations of tropical Pacific climate can exert significant influence over Southeast Asian climate and society.
   Monsoons, Asia

3. [Bekryaev et al. 2010]
   Abstract This study uses an extensive dataset of monthly surface air temperature (SAT) records (including previously unutilized) from high-latitude (>60°N) meteorological land stations. Most records have been updated by very recent observations (up to December 2008). Using these data, a high-latitude warming rate of 1.36°C century−1 is documented for 1875–2008—the trend is almost 2 times stronger than the Northern Hemisphere trend (0.79°C century−1), with an accelerated warming rate in the most recent decade (1.35°C decade−1). Stronger warming in high-latitude regions is a manifestation of polar amplification (PA). Changes in SAT suggest two spatial scales of PA—hemispheric and local. A new stable statistical measure of PA linking high-latitude and hemispheric temperature anomalies via a regression relationship is proposed. For 1875–2008, this measure yields PA of ∼1.62. Local PA related to the ice–albedo feedback mechanisms is autumnal and coastal, extending several hundred kilometers inland. Heat budget estimates suggest that a recent reduction of arctic ice and anomalously high SATs cannot be explained by ice–albedo feedback mechanisms alone, and the role of large-scale mechanisms of PA of global warming should not be overlooked.
   Polar amplification

4. [Christiansen et al. 2010b]
   This study investigates the possibility of reconstructing past global mean sea levels. Reconstruction methods rely on historical measurements from tide gauges combined with knowledge about the spatial covariance structure of the sea level field obtained froma shorter periodwith spatiallywell-resolved satellitemeasurements. Asurrogate ensemblemethod is applied based on sea levels froma 500-yr climatemodel simulation. Tide gauges are simulated by selecting time series from grid points along continental coastlines and on ocean islands. Reconstructions of global mean sea levels can then be compared to the known target, and the ensemble method allows an estimation of the statistical properties originating from the stochastic nature of the reconstructions. Different reconstruction methods previously used in the literature are studied, including projection and optimal interpolation methods based on EOF analysis of the calibration period. This study also includes methods where these EOFs are augmented with a homogeneous pattern, with the purpose of better capturing a possible geographically homogeneous trend. These covariance-based methods are compared to a simple weighted mean method. It is concluded that the projection and optimal interpolation methods are very sensitive to the length of the calibration period. For realistic lengths of 10 and 20 yr, very large biases and spread in the reconstructed 1900  49 trends are found. Including a homogeneous pattern in the basis drastically improves the reconstructions of the trend and reduces the sensitivity to the length of the calibration period. The projection and optimal interpolation methods are now comparable to the weighted mean with biases less than 10However, the spread is still considerable. The amplitude of the year-to-year variability is in general strongly overestimated by all reconstruction methods. With regards to year-to-year variability, several methods outperform the simple mean. Finally, for the projection method, reconstruction errors are decomposed into contributions from the sparse coverage of tide gauges and the incomplete knowledge of the covariance structure of the sea level field. The study finds that the contributions of the different sources depend on the diagnostics of the reconstruction. It is noted that sea level is constrained by the approximate conservation of the total mass of the ocean. This poses challenges for the sea level reconstructions that are not present for other fields such as temperature.
   Climate reconstruction, sea level,pseudoreality

5. [Christiansen et al. 2010a]
   In their comment Rutherford et al. (2010) argue that we have underestimated the performance of RegEM TTLS by using suboptimal values of the stagnation tolerance and the truncation parameter, and by using raw annual data instead of 20-yr low-pass-filtered data. Here we first comment generally on these choices and on the difference between an ensemble approach and a single realization. Then we present calculations to investigate the importance of the different choices. As in Christiansen et al. (2009) we only consider diagnostics of the Northern Hemisphere mean temperature.
   Climate reconstruction, sea level,pseudoreality

6. [Cook et al. 2010]
   The Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP) was undertaken to assess the climatic effects of the presence of large ice-sheets and changes in the Earth s orbital parameters in fully coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs). Much of the previous literature has focussed on the tropics and the Northern Hemisphere during the last glacial maximum and Mid-Holocene whereas this study focuses only on the Southern Hemisphere. This study addresses the representation of the Semiannual Oscillation (SAO) in the PMIP2 models and how it may have changed during the Mid-Holocene. The output from the five models suggest a weakening of the (austral) autumn circumpolar trough (CPT) and (in all but one model) a strengthening of the spring CPT. The effects of changing the orbital parameters are to cause warming and drying during spring over New Zealand and a cooling and moistening during autumn. The amount of spring warming/drying and autumn cooling/ moistening is variable between the models and depends on the climatological locations of surface pressure anomalies associated with changes in the SAO. This study also undertakes an Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis of the leading modes of atmospheric variability during the control and Mid-Holocene phases for each model. Despite the seasonal changes, the overall month by month and interannual variability was simulated to have changed little from the Mid-Holocene to present.
   SH semiannual oscilaltion PMIP

7. [Boehm et al. 2010]
   Abstract Instrumental temperature recording in the Greater Alpine Region (GAR) began in the year 1760. Prior to the 1850 1870 period, after which screens of different types protected the instruments, thermometers were insufficiently sheltered from direct sunlight so were normally placed on north-facing walls or windows. It is likely that temperatures recorded in the summer half of the year were biased warm and those in the winter half biased cold, with the summer effect dominating. Because the changeover to screens often occurred at similar times, often coincident with the formation of National Meteorological Services (NMSs) in the GAR, it has been difficult to determine the scale of the problem, as all neighbour sites were likely to be similarly affected. This paper uses simultaneous measurements taken for eight recent years at the old and modern site at Kremsmünster, Austria to assess the issue. The temperature differences between the two locations (screened and unscreened) have caused a change in the diurnal cycle, which depends on the time of year. Starting from this specific empirical evidence from the only still existing and active early instrumental measuring site in the region, we developed three correction models for orientations NW through N to NE. Using the orientation angle of the buildings derived from metadata in the station histories of the other early instrumental sites in the region (sites across the GAR in the range from NE to NW) different adjustments to the diurnal cycle are developed for each location. The effect on the 32 sites across the GAR varies due to different formulae being used by NMSs to calculate monthly means from the two ormore observations made at each site each day. These formulae also vary with time, so considerable amounts of additional metadata have had to be collected to apply the adjustments across the whole network. Overall, the results indicate that summer (April to September) average temperatures are cooled by about 0.4 C before 1850, with winters (October to March) staying much the same. The effects on monthly temperature averages are largest in June (a cooling from 0.21  to 0.93 C, depending on location) to a slight warming (up to 0.3 C) at some sites in February. In addition to revising the temperature evolution during the past centuries, the results have important implications for the calibration of proxy climatic data in the region (such as tree ring indices and documentary data such as grape harvest dates). A difference series across the 32 sites in the GAR indicates that summers since 1760 have warmed by about 1 C less than winters.
   Early instrumental data, temperature corrections

8. [Cook et al. 2010]
   The Asian monsoon system affects more than half of humanity worldwide, yet the dynamical processes that govern its complex spatiotemporal variability are not sufficiently understood to model and predict its behavior, due in part to inadequate long-term climate observations. Here we present the Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas (MADA), a seasonally resolved gridded spatial reconstruction of Asian monsoon drought and pluvials over the past millennium, derived from a network of tree-ring chronologies. MADA provides the spatiotemporal details of known historic monsoon failures and reveals the occurrence, severity, and fingerprint of previously unknown monsoon megadroughts and their close linkages to large-scale patterns of tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface temperatures. MADA thus provides a long-term context for recent monsoon variability that is critically needed for climate modeling, prediction, and attribution
   Monsoons, drought, Asia

9. [Esper et al. 2010]
   Estimates of past climate and future forest biomass dynamics are constrained by uncertainties in the relationships between growth and climatic variability and uncertainties in the instrumental data themselves. Of particular interest in this regard is the borealforest zone, where radial growth has historically been closely connected with temperature variability, but various lines of evidence have indicated a decoupling since about the 1960s. We here address this growth-vs.-temperature divergence by analyzing tree-ring width and density data fromacross Siberia, and comparing 20th century proxy trends with those derived from instrumental stations. We test the influence of approaches considered in the recent literature on the divergence phenomenon (DP), including effects of tree-ring standardization and calibration period, and explore instrumental uncertainties by employing both adjusted and nonadjusted temperature data to assess growth-climate agreement. Results indicate that common methodological and data usage decisions alter 20th century growth and temperature trends in a way that can easily explain the post-1960 DP. We show that (i) Siberian station temperature adjustments were up to 1.3 1C for decadal means before 1940, (ii) tree-ring detrending effects in the order of 0.6 0.8 1C, and (iii) calibration uncertainties up to about 0.4 1C over the past 110 years. Despite these large uncertainties, instrumental and tree growth estimates for the entire 20th century warming interval match each other, to a degree previously not recognized, when care is taken to preserve long-term trends in the tree-ring data. We further show that careful examination of early temperature data and calibration of proxy timeseries over the full period of overlap with instrumental data are both necessary to properly estimate 20th century longterm changes and to avoid erroneous detection of post-1960 divergence.
   Divergence problem

10. [Fischer et al. 2010]
    Recent progress in the reconstruction of atmospheric CO2 records from Antarctic ice cores has allowed for the documentation of natural CO2 variations on orbital time scales over the last up to 800,000 years and for the resolution of millennial CO2 variations during the last glacial cycle in unprecedented detail. This has shown that atmospheric CO2 varied within natural bounds of approximately 170 300 ppmv but never reached recent CO2 concentrations caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions. In addition, the natural atmospheric CO2 concentrations show an extraordinary correlation with Southern Ocean climate changes, pointing to a significant (direct or indirect) influence of climatic and environmental changes in the Southern Ocean region on atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Here, we compile recent ice core and marine sediment records of atmospheric CO2, temperature and environmental changes in the Southern Ocean region, as well as carbon cycle model experiments, in order to quantify the effect of potential Southern Ocean processes on atmospheric CO2 related to these orbital and millennial changes. This shows that physical and biological changes in the SO are able to explain substantial parts of the glacial/interglacial CO2 change, but that none of the single processes is able to explain this change by itself. In particular, changes in the Southern Ocean related to changes in the surface buoyancy flux, which in return is controlled by the waxing and waning of sea ice may favorably explain the high correlation of CO2 and Antarctic temperature on orbital and millennial time scales. In contrast, the changes of the position and strength of the westerly wind field were most likely too small to explain the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 or may even have increased atmospheric CO2 in the glacial. Also iron fertilization of the marine biota in the Southern Ocean contributes to a glacial drawdown of CO2 but turns out to be limited by other factors than the total dust input such as bioavailability of iron or macronutrient supply.
    CO2 changes and Southern Ocean

11. [Frank et al. 2010]
    The high-resolution reconstruction of hemispheric-scale temperature variation over the past-millennium benchmarks recent warming against more naturally driven climate episodes, such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, thereby allowing assessment of the relative efficacies of natural and anthropogenic forcing factors. Icons of past temperature variability, as featured in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports over nearly two decades, have changed from a schematic sketch in 1990, to a seemingly well-solved story in 2001, to more explicit recognition of significant uncertainties in 2007. In this article, we detail the beginning of the movement to reconstruct large-scale temperatures, highlight major steps forward, and present our views on what remains to be accomplished. Despite significant efforts and progress, the spatial representation of reconstructions is limited, and the interannual and centennial variation are poorly quantified. Research priorities to reduce reconstruction uncertainties and improve future projections, include (1) increasing the role of expert assessment in selecting and incorporating the highest quality proxy data in reconstructions (2) employing reconstruction ensemble methodology, and (3) further improvements of forcing series. We suggest that much of the sensitivity in the reconstructions, a topic that has dominated scientific debates, can be traced back to the input data. It is perhaps advisable to use fewer, but expert-assessed proxy records to reduce errors in future reconstruction efforts.
    Discourse about climate reconstructions

12. [García-Bustamante et al. 2010]
    CCA downscaling wind in the NE Iberian Peninsula
    Wind downscaling

13. [Goosse et al. 2010]
    Ensemble simulations have been performed with a climate model constrained to follow temperature histories obtained from a recent compilation of 56 well calibrated surface temperature proxy records, using a new data assimilation technique. First, we demonstrate that the data assimilation technique provides a faithful representation in the Northern Hemisphere of the signal recorded by the climate proxies at both the regional and gridbox scales. Second, by varying the external forcing, the parameters of the data assimilation method, and the parameters controlling the equilibrium climate sensitivity of the climate model, we demonstrate that the uncertainty in model results is much lower in simulations using data assimilation than in those without it. This observation implies that the data assimilation, using a set of 56 proxies, is providing an efficient and robust constraint on the simulated climate variability over the past centuries. At the hemispheric and continental scales, the model reconstructions using data assimilation are in good agreement with both the instrumental record of the past 150 years and reconstructions of climate in past centuries derived from the application of traditional statistical approaches to networks of proxy data. This increases the confidence in both the data assimilation and traditional statistical approaches. Our data assimilation method, however, is unable to provide a reliable reconstruction over the North Atlantic Ocean, which we attribute to the paucity of proxy data in that region.
    Climate reconstruttions, last millennium, Data assimillation

14. [Guiot et al. 2010] Abstract Background: The lack of instrumental data before the mid-19th-century limits our understanding of present warming trends. In the absence of direct measurements, we used proxies that are natural or historical archives recording past climatic changes. A gridded reconstruction of spring-summer temperature was produced for Europe based on tree-rings, documentaries, pollen assemblages and ice cores. The majority of proxy series have an annual resolution. For a better inference of long-term climate variation, they were completed by low-resolution data (decadal or more), mostly on pollen and ice-core data. Methodology/Principal Findings: An original spectral analog method was devised to deal with this heterogeneous dataset, and to preserve long-term variations and the variability of temperature series. So we can replace the recent climate changes in a broader context of the past 1400 years. This preservation is possible because the method is not based on a calibration (regression) but on similarities between assemblages of proxies. The reconstruction of the April-September temperatures was validated with a Jack-knife technique. It was also compared to other spatially gridded temperature reconstructions, literature data, and glacier advance and retreat curves. We also attempted to relate the spatial distribution of European temperature anomalies to known solar and volcanic forcings. Conclusions: We found that our results were accurate back to 750. Cold periods prior to the 20th century can be explained partly by low solar activity and/or high volcanic activity. The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) could be correlated to higher solar activity. During the 20th century, however only anthropogenic forcing can explain the exceptionally high temperature rise. Warm periods of the Middle Age were spatially more heterogeneous than last decades, and then locally it could have been warmer. However, at the continental scale, the last decades were clearly warmer than any period of the last 1400 years. The heterogeneity of MWP versus the homogeneity of the last decades is likely an argument that different forcings could have operated. These results support the fact that we are living a climate change in Europe never seen in the past 1400 years.
    Last millennium, EU temperature reconstructions

15. [Graham et al. 2010]
    Abstract Widely distributed proxy records indicate that the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; *900 1350 AD) was characterized by coherent shifts in large-scale Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation patterns. Although cooler sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific can explain some aspects of medieval circulation changes, they are not sufficient to account for other notable features, including widespread aridity through the Eurasian sub-tropics, stronger winter westerlies across the North Atlantic and Western Europe, and shifts in monsoon rainfall patterns across Africa and South Asia. We present results from a full-physics coupled climate model showing that a slight warming of the tropical Indian and western Pacific Oceans relative to the other tropical ocean basins can induce a broad range of the medieval circulation and climate changes indicated by proxy data, including many of those not explained by a cooler tropical Pacific alone. Important aspects of the results resemble those from previous simulations examining the climatic response to the rapid Indian Ocean warming during the late twentieth century, and to results from climate warming simulations especially in indicating an expansion of the Northern Hemisphere Hadley circulation. Notably, the pattern of tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) change responsible for producing the proxy-model similarity in our results agrees well with MCA-LIA SST differences obtained in a recent proxy-based climate field reconstruction. Though much remains unclear, our results indicate that the MCA was characterized by an enhanced zonal Indo-Pacific SST gradient with resulting changes in Northern Hemisphere tropical and extra-tropical circulation patterns and hydroclimate regimes, linkages that may explain the coherent regional climate shifts indicated by proxy records from across the planet. The findings provide new perspectives on the nature and possible causes of the MCA a remarkable, yet incompletely understood episode of Late Holocene climatic change.
    Last millenium clmate simulation-proxy comparison

16. [Graham et al. 2010]
    Review of solar influences on climate
    Solar influence, solar reconstructions

17. [Hansen et al. 2010]
    We update the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis of global surface temperature change, compare alternative analyses, and address questions about perception and reality of global warming. Satellite-observed night lights are used to identify measurement stations located in extreme darkness and adjust temperature trends of urban and periurban stations for nonclimatic factors, verifying that urban effects on analyzed global change are small. Because the GISS analysis combines available sea surface temperature records with meteorological station measurements, we test alternative choices for the ocean data, showing that global temperature change is sensitive to estimated temperature change in polar regions where observations are limited. We use simple 12 month (and n × 12) running means to improve the information content in our temperature graphs. Contrary to a popular misconception, the rate of warming has not declined. Global temperature is rising as fast in the past decade as in the prior 2 decades, despite year-to-year fluctuations associated with the El Niño-La Nina cycle of tropical ocean temperature. Record high global 12 month running mean temperature for the period with instrumental data was reached in 2010.
    Global temperatures

18. [Jiménez et al. 2010b]
    Abstract: This study analyzes the daily-mean surface wind variability over an area characterized by complex to- pography through comparing observations and a 2-km-spatial-resolution simulation performed with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model for the period 1992–2005. The evaluation focuses on the performance of the simulation to reproduce the wind variability within subregions identified from observa- tions over the 1999–2002 period in a previous study. By comparing with wind observations, the model results show the ability of the WRF dynamical downscaling over a region of complex terrain. The higher spatio- temporal resolution of the WRF simulation is used to evaluate the extent to which the length of the obser- vational period and the limited spatial coverage of observations condition one’s understanding of the wind variability over the area. The subregions identified with the simulation during the 1992–2005 period are similar to those identified with observations (1999–2002). In addition, the reduced number of stations reasonably represents the spatial wind variability over the area. However, the analysis of the full spatial dimension simu- lated by the model suggests that observational coverage could be improved in some subregions. The approach adopted here can have a direct application to the design of observational networks.
    Regionalization in WRF

19. [Jiménez et al. 2010a]
    Abstract: Meteorological data of good quality are important for understanding both global and regional climates. In this respect, great efforts have been made to evaluate temperature- and precipitation-related records. This study summarizes the evaluations made to date of the quality of wind speed and direction records acquired at 41 automated weather stations in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula. Observations were acquired from 1992 to 2005 at a temporal resolution of 10 and 30 min. A quality assurance system was imposed to screen the records for 1) manipulation errors associated with storage and management of the data, 2) consistency limits to ensure that observations are within their natural limits of variation, and 3) temporal consistency to assess abnormally low/high variations in the individual time series. In addition, the most important biases of the dataset are analyzed and corrected wherever possible. A total of 1.8 percent wind speed and 3.7 percent wind direction records was assumed invalid, pointing to specific problems in wind measurement. The study not only tries to contribute to the science with the creation of a wind dataset of improved quality, but it also reports on potential errors that could be present in other wind datasets.
    Quality Assurance

20. [Jones et al. 2010]
    This study is an extensive revision of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) land station temperature database that has been used to produce a grid-box data set of 5 latitude  5 longitude temperature anomalies. The new database (CRUTEM4) comprises 5583 station records of which 4842 have enough data for the 1961–1990 period to calculate or estimate the average temperatures for this period. Many station records have had their data replaced by newly homogenized series that have been produced by a number of studies, particularly from National Meteorological Services (NMSs). Hemispheric temperature averages for land areas developed with the new CRUTEM4 data set differ slightly from their CRUTEM3 equivalent. The inclusion of much additional data from the Arctic (particularly the Russian Arctic) has led to estimates for the Northern Hemisphere (NH) being warmer by about 0.1 C for the years since 2001. The NH/Southern Hemisphere (SH) warms by 1.12 C/0.84C over the period 1901–2010. The robustness of the hemispheric averages is assessed by producing five different analyses, each including a different subset of 20% of the station time series and by omitting some large countries. CRUTEM4 is also compared with hemispheric averages produced by reanalyses undertaken by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF): ERA-40 (1958–2001) and ERA-Interim (1979–2010) data sets. For the NH, agreement is good back to 1958 and excellent from 1979 at monthly, annual, and decadal time scales. For the SH, agreement is poorer, but if the area is restricted to the SH north of 6 T S, the agreement is dramatically improved from the mid-1970s.
    Global temperature averages

21. [Jungclaus et al. 2010]
    Abstract. A long-standing task in climate research has been to distinguish between anthropogenic climate change and natural climate variability. A prerequisite for fulfilling this task is the understanding of the relative roles of external drivers and internal variability of climate and the carbon cycle. Here, we present the first ensemble simulations over the last 1200 years with a comprehensive Earth system model including a fully interactive carbon cycle. Applying up-to-date reconstructions of external forcing including the recent lowamplitude estimates of solar variations, the ensemble simulations reproduce temperature evolutions consistent with the range of reconstructions. The 20th-century warming trend stands out against all pre-industrial trends within the ensemble. Volcanic eruptions are necessary to explain variations in pre-industrial climate such as the Little Ice Age; yet only the strongest, repeated eruptions lead to cooling trends that differ significantly from the internal variability across all ensemble members. The simulated atmospheric CO2 concentrations exhibit a stable carbon cycle over the pre-industrial era with multi-centennial variations somewhat smaller than in the observational records. Early land-cover changes have modulated atmospheric CO2 concentrations only slightly. We provide a model-based quantification of the sensitivity (termedG ) of the global carbon cycle to temperature for a variety of climate and forcing conditions. We diagnose a dis- tinct dependence of G on the forcing strength and time-scales involved, thus providing a possible explanation for the systematic difference in the observational estimates for different segments of the last millennium
    Millennium climate simulations, forcing, CO2

22. [Kohler et al. 2010]
    The temperature on Earth varied largely in the Pleistocene from cold glacials to interglacials of different warmths. To contribute to an understanding of the underlying causes of these changes we compile various environmental records (and model-based interpretations of some of them) in order to calculate the direct effect of various processes on Earth s radiative budget and, thus, on global annual mean surface temperature over the last 800,000 years. The importance of orbital variations, of the greenhouse gases CO2, CH4 and N2O, of the albedo of land ice sheets, annual mean snow cover, sea ice area and vegetation, and of the radiative perturbation of mineral dust in the atmosphere are investigated. Altogether we can explain with these processes a global cooling of 3.9 0.8 K in the equilibrium temperature for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) directly from the radiative budget using only the Planck feedback that parameterises the direct effect on the radiative balance, but neglecting other feedbacks such as water vapour, cloud cover, and lapse rate. The unaccounted feedbacks and related uncertainties would, if taken at present day feedback strengths, decrease the global temperature at the LGM by 8.0 1.6 K. Increased Antarctic temperatures during the Marine Isotope Stages 5.5, 7.5, 9.3 and 11.3 are in our conceptual approach difficult to explain. If compared with other studies, such as PMIP2, this gives supporting evidence that the feedbacks themselves are not constant, but depend in their strength on the mean climate state. The best estimate and uncertainty for our reconstructed radiative forcing and LGM cooling support a present day equilibrium climate sensitivity (excluding the ice sheet and vegetation components) between 1.4 and 5.2 K, with a most likely value near 2.4 K, somewhat smaller than other methods but consistent with the consensus range of 2 4.5 K derived from other lines of evidence. Climate sensitivities above 6 K are difficult to reconcile with Last Glacial Maximum reconstructions.
    LGM temperature changes and radiative forcing

23. [Lamarque et al. 2010]
    Abstract. We present and discuss a new dataset of gridded emissions covering the historical period (1850 2000) in decadal increments at a horizontal resolution of 0.5 in latitude and longitude. The primary purpose of this inventory is to provide consistent gridded emissions of reactive gases and aerosols for use in chemistry model simulations needed by climate models for the Climate Model Intercomparison Program 5 (CMIP5) in support of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment report (AR5). Our best estimate for the year 2000 inventory represents a combination of existing regional and global inventories to capture the best information available at this point; 40 regions and 12 sectors are used to combine the various sources. The historical reconstruction of each emitted compound, for each region and sector, is then forced to agree with our 2000 estimate, ensuring continuity between past and 2000 emissions. Simulations from two chemistry-climate models are used to test the ability of the emission dataset described here to capture long-term changes in atmospheric ozone, carbon monoxide and aerosol distributions. The simulated long-term change in the Northern mid-latitudes surface and mid-troposphere ozone is not quite as rapid as observed. However, stations outside this latitude band show much better agreement in both present-day and long-term trend. The model simulations indicate that the concentration of carbon monoxide is underestimated at the Mace Head station; however, the long-term trend over the limited observational period seems to be reasonably well captured. The simulated sulfate and black carbon deposition over Greenland is in very good agreement with the ice-core observations spanning the simulation period. Finally, aerosol optical depth and additional aerosol diagnostics are shown to be in good agreement with previously published estimates and observations.
    Black carbon inventory

24. [Lean 2010]
    How indeed whether the Sun s variable energy outputs influence Earth s climate has engaged scientific curiosity for more than a century. Early evidence accrued from correlations of assorted solar and climate indices, and from recognition that cycles near 11, 88 and 205 years are common in both the Sun and climate.1,2 But until recently, an influence of solar variability on climate, whether through cycles or trends, was usually dismissed because climate simulations with (primarily) simple energy balance models indicated that responses to the decadal solar cycle would be so small as to be undetectable in observations.3 However, in the past decade modeling studies have found both resonant responses and positive feedbacks in the ocean-atmosphere system that may amplify the response to solar irradiance variations.4,5 Today, solar cycles and trends are recognized as important components of natural climate variability on decadal to centennial time scales. Understanding solar-terrestrial linkages is requisite for the comprehensive understanding of Earth s evolving environment. The attribution of present-day climate change, interpretation of changes prior to the industrial epoch, and forecast of future decadal climate change necessitate quantitative understanding of how, when, where, and why natural variability, including by the Sun, may exceed, obscure or mitigate anthropogenic changes .
    Solar forcing

25. [Li et al. 2010]
    Understanding the dynamics of climate change in its full richness requires the knowledge of long temperature time series. Although longterm, widely distributed temperature observations are not available, there are other forms of data, known as climate proxies, that can have a statistical relationship with temperatures and have been used to infer temperatures in the past before direct measurements. We propose a Bayesian hierarchical model to reconstruct past temperatures that integrates information from different sources, such as proxies with different temporal resolution and forcings acting as the external drivers of large scale temperature evolution. Additionally, this method allows us to quantify the uncertainty of the reconstruction in a rigorous manner. The reconstruction method is assessed, using a global climate model as the true climate system and with synthetic proxy data derived from the simulation. The target is to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperature from proxies that mimic the sampling and errors from tree ring measurements, pollen indices, and borehole temperatures. The forcing series used as covariates are solar irradiance, volcanic aerosols, and greenhouse gas concentrations. The Bayesian model was successful in integrating these different sources of information in creating a coherent reconstruction. Within the context of this numerical testbed, a statistical process model that includes the external forcings can improve the quality of a hemispheric reconstruction when long time scale proxy information is not available. This article has supplementary material online.
    Multi proxy reconstructions, bayesian

26. [Ljungqvist 2010]
    A new temperature reconstruction with decadal resolution, covering the last two millennia, is presented for the extratropical Northern Hemisphere (90 30°N), utilizing many palaeotemperature proxy records never previously included in any largescale temperature reconstruction. The amplitude of the reconstructed temperature variability on centennial time-scales exceeds 0.6°C. This reconstruction is the first to show a distinct Roman Warm Period c. AD 1 300, reaching up to the 1961 1990 mean temperature level, followed by the Dark Age Cold Period c. AD 300 800. The Medieval Warm Period is seen c. AD 800 1300 and the Little Ice Age is clearly visible c. AD 1300 1900, followed by a rapid temperature increase in the twentieth century. The highest average temperatures in the reconstruction are encountered in the mid to late tenth century and the lowest in the late seventeenth century. Decadal mean temperatures seem to have reached or exceeded the 1961 1990 mean temperature level during substantial parts of the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period. The temperature of the last two decades, however, is possibly higher than during any previous time in the past two millennia, although this is only seen in the instrumental temperature data and not in the multi-proxy reconstruction itself. Our temperature reconstruction agrees well with the reconstructions by Moberg et al. (2005) and Mann et al. (2008) with regard to the amplitude of the variability as well as the timing of warm and cold periods, except for the period c. AD 300 800, despite significant differences in both data coverage and methodology.
    NH extra tropical temperature reconstruction

27. [MacDougall et al. 2010]
    Heat fluxes in the continental subsurface were estimated from general circulation model (GCM) simulations of the climate of the last millennium and compared to those obtained from subsurface geothermal data. Since GCMs have bottom boundary conditions (BBCs) that are less than 10 m deep and thus may be thermodynamically restricted in the continental subsurface, we used an idealized land surface model (LSM) with a very deep BBC to estimate the potential for realistic subsurface heat storage in the absence of bottom boundary constraints. Results indicate that there is good agreement between observed fluxes and GCM simulated fluxes for the 1780–1980 period when the GCM simulated temperatures are coupled to the LSM with deep BBC. These results emphasize the importance of placing a deep BBC in GCM soil components for the proper simulation of the overall continental heat budget. In addition, the agreement between the LSM surface fluxes and the borehole temperature reconstructed fluxes lends additional support to the overall quality of the GCM (ECHO‐G) paleoclimatic simulations.
    Heat storage in models

28. [McGuire et al. 2010]
    This paper integrates dendrochronological, demographic, and experimental perspectives to improve understanding of the response of white spruce (Picea glauca (Moench) Voss) tree growth to climatic variability in interior Alaska. The dendrochronological analyses indicate that climate warming has led to widespread declines in white spruce growth throughout interior Alaska that have become more prevalent during the 20th century. Similarly, demographic studies show that white spruce tree growth is substantially limited by soil moisture availability in both mid- and late-successional stands. Interannual variability in tree growth among stands within a landscape exhibits greater synchrony than does growth of trees that occupy different landscapes, which agrees with dendrochronological findings that the responses depend on landscape position and prevailing climate. In contrast, the results from 18 years of a summer moisture limitation experiment showed that growth in midsuccessional upland stands was unaffected by moisture limitation and that moisture limitation decreased white spruce growth in floodplain stands where it was expected that growth would be less vulnerable because of tree access to river water. Taken together, the evidence from the different perspectives analyzed in this study clearly indicates that white spruce tree growth in interior Alaska is vulnerable to the effects of warming on plant water balance.
    Divergence problem

29. [Matthews and Weaver 2010]
    To the Editor , the perception that future climate warming is inevitable stands at the centre of current climate-policy discussions. We argue that the notion of unavoidable warming owing to inertia in the climate system is based on an incorrect interpretation of climate science. Stable atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would lead to continued warming, but if carbon dioxide emissions could be eliminated entirely, temperatures would quickly stabilize or even decrease over time. Future warming is therefore driven by socio-economic inertia, and is only as inevitable as future emissions. As a consequence, mitigation e"orts to minimize future greenhouse-gas emissions can successfully restrict future warming to a level that may avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. !e challenge of climate mitigation, although daunting, is fully within the scope of human control.
    Climate change committment, adaptation, mitigation

30. [Metcalfe et al. 2010]
    High-resolution titanium (Ti) data obtained using an ITRAX XRF core scanner from a laminated sediment core from the Laguna de Juanacatlán, western central Mexico yield a unique high-resolution record of runoff (precipitation) change for the last 2000 years. In the absence of reliable, long-term meteorological records, comparison of the Ti data with information from the rich Spanish colonial period archives and the post-Independence period, confirms that Ti is a proxy for runoff. This interpretation is supported by comparison with other high-resolution archives from the surrounding region, primarily tree rings and other lake sediment sequences. The Juanacatlán Ti record is therefore a proxy for summer, monsoonal rainfall. The record provides new evidence from the Pacific margin of tropical North America of the occurrence of dry conditions through much of the Classic period (c. ad 300 900), and wetter conditions during the later Medieval period (c. ad 1200 1350). The period commonly known as the Little Ice Age  (LIA) shows considerable variability, with dry conditions in the early part (c. ad 1400 1600) and wetter conditions, punctuated by multiyear droughts through the eighteenth century. A notable feature of the record is the apparent decoupling of lacustrine sedimentation from the climate since the mid-twentieth century, possibly resulting from anthropogenic disturbance. Preliminary interpretations of the Ti record indicate that patterns are consistent with changes in monsoon strength associated with ENSO and solar forcing over the last two millennia.
    Last millennium, Monsoon, drought

31. [Newkom et al. 2010]
    We present the first spatially and temporally highly resolved gridded reconstruction of multicentennial precipitation variability for southern South America (SSA). A novel reconstruction approach of deriving 10,000 ensemble members based on varying predictor networks and methodological settings allows the identification of spatiotemporal changes in SSA precipitation and associated uncertainties. The summer and winter reconstructions back to AD 1498 and AD 1590, respectively, provide new evidence for multicentennial increase in summer precipitation and an opposing decrease in winter precipitation into the 20th century. The drying in winter is significant over large parts of SSA, whereas the patterns for summer, possibly representing convective rainfall, have displayed high spatial variability. The fact that such longterm seasonal and spatial changes have occurred in the past, underlines the complex form that hydroclimatic variability might have in the future. This emphasizes the need for careful adaptation strategies as governments become attuned to the realities of climate change.
    Precip reconstruction SSA

32. [Neukom et al. 2010]
    We statistically reconstruct austral summer (winter) surface air temperature fields back to AD 900 (1706) using 22 (20) annually resolved predictors from natural and human archives from southern South America (SSA). This represents the first regional-scale climate field reconstruction for parts of the Southern Hemisphere at this high temporal resolution. We apply three different reconstruction techniques: multivariate principal component regression, composite plus scaling, and regularized expectation maximization. There is generally good agreement between the results of the three methods on interannual and decadal timescales. The field reconstructions allow us to describe differences and similarities in the temperature evolution of different sub-regions of SSA. The reconstructed SSA mean summer temperatures between 900 and 1350 are mostly above the 1901 1995 climatology. After 1350, we reconstruct a sharp transition to colder conditions, which last until approximately 1700. The summers in the eighteenth century are relatively warm with a subsequent cold relapse peaking around 1850. In the twentieth century, summer temperatures reach conditions similar to earlier warm periods. The winter temperatures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were mostly below the twentieth century average. The uncertainties of our reconstructions are generally largest in the eastern lowlands of SSA, where the coverage with proxy data is poorest. Verifications with independent summer temperature proxies and instrumental measurements suggest that the interannual and multi-decadal variations of SSA temperatures are well captured by our reconstructions. This new dataset can be used for data/model comparison and data assimilation as well as for detection and attribution studies at sub-continental scales.
    Temp reconstruction SSA

33. [Oleson et al. 2010] Tech rep CLM 4.0
    LSM, CLM

34. [Pethica et al. 2010]
    Changes in climate have significant implications for present lives, for future generations and for ecosystems on which humanity depends. Consequently, climate change has been and continues to be the subject of intensive scientific research and public debate.

    There is strong evidence that the warming of the Earth over the last half-century has been caused largely by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, including agriculture and deforestation. The size of future temperature increases and other aspects of climate change, especially at the regional scale, are still subject to uncertainty. Nevertheless, the risks associated with some of these changes are substantial. It is important that decision makers have access to climate science of the highest quality, and can take account of its findings in formulating appropriate responses.

    In view of the ongoing public and political debates about climate change, the aim of this document is to summarise the current scientific evidence on climate change and its drivers. It lays out clearly where the science is well established, where there is wide consensus but continuing debate, and where there remains substantial uncertainty. The impacts of climate change, as distinct from the causes, are not considered here. This document draws upon recent evidence and builds on the Fourth Assessment Report of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2007, which is the most comprehensive source of climate science and its uncertainties.
    Climate change report.

35. [Pontgratz et al. 2010]
    Anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) is one of the few climate forcings with still unknown sign of their climate response. Major uncertainty results from the often counteracting temperature responses to biogeochemical as compared to biogeophysical effects. Here, we separate the strength of these two effects for ALCC during the last millennium. We add unprecedented detail by (i) using a coupled atmosphere/ocean general circulation model (GCM), and (ii) applying a high detail reconstruction of historical ALCC. We find that biogeophysical effects have a slight cooling influence on global mean temperature ( 0.03 K in the 20th century), while biogeochemical effects lead to strong warming (0.16 0.18 K). During the industrial era, both effects cause significant changes in certain regions; only few regions, however, experience biogeophysical cooling strong enough to dominate the overall temperature response. This study therefore suggests that the climate response to historical ALCC, both globally and in most regions, is dominated by the rise in CO2 caused by ALCC emissions.
    Land cover reconstructions, simulations of biogeophysical and chemical effects

36. [Powell 2010]
    Nice essay about scientific writting. Good also for students. It is also followed by a column about postdoc selecion and stability in science careers.
    Scientific writting.

37. [Russell and McGregor 2010]
    Abstract The atmospheric circulation patterns in the Southern Hemisphere have had a significant impact on the climate of the Antarctic and there is much evidence that these circulation patterns have changed in the recent past. This change is thought to have contributed to the warming trend observed at the Antarctic Peninsula over the last 50 years one of the largest trends observed in this period on the planet. The trends associated with the continental Antarctic climate are less clear but are likely to be impacted less directly by atmospheric circulation changes. The circulation changes can be put into the context of longer timescales by considering atmospheric circulation reconstructions that have been performed using data from Antarctic ice cores. In this review paper we look at the main body of work examining: Antarctic climate trends; the understanding and impact of atmospheric circulation of the midto high-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere; and the usefulness and reliability of atmospheric circulation reconstructions from Antarctic ice core data. Finally, beyond several of the more quantitative reconstructions, it is deemed that an assessment of their consistency is not possible due to the variety of circulation characteristics that the various reconstructions consider.
    Atmospheric circulation SH review.

38. [Rutherford et al. 2010]
    In a recent paper, Christiansen et al. compared climate reconstruction methods using surrogate ensembles from a coupled general circulation model and pseudoproxies. Their results using the regularized expectation maximization method with truncated total least squares (RegEM-TTLS) appear inconsistent with previous studies. Results presented here show that the poor performance of RegEM-TTLS in Christiansen et al. is due to 1) their use of the nonhybrid method compared to the hybrid method; 2) a stagnation tolerance that is too large and does not permit the solution to stabilize, which is compounded in another paper by Christiansen et al. by the introduction of an inappropriate measure of stagnation; and 3) their use of a truncation parameter that is too large. Thus, the poor performance of RegEM-TTLS in both Christiansen et al. papers is due to poor implementation of the method rather than to shortcomings inherent to the method.
    Climate reconstruction methods, RegEM

39. [Schiermeier 2010b]
    The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November presented an early Christmas present to climate-change denialists. Amid the more than 1,000 messages were several controversial comments that  taken out of context  seemingly indicate that climate scientists have been hiding a mound of dirty laundry from the public.
    Uncertainties in climate science

40. [Schiermeier 2010a]
    Hundreds of millions of people rely on water from the Himalayas' mighty glaciers, which experts agree are shrinking as a result of rising global temperatures. But a claim that all of the ice could be gone by 2035  enshrined in the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  has come under fire from, among others, a coordinating lead author of the IPCC chapter that uses the questionable figure.
    Himalayan glaciers

41. [Schilt et al. 2010]
    We present records of atmospheric nitrous oxide obtained from the ice cores of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) Dome C and Dronning Maud Land sites shedding light on the concentration of this greenhouse gas on glacial interglacial and millennial time scales. The extended EPICA Dome C record covers now all interglacials of the last 800,000 years and reveals nitrous oxide variations in concert with climate. Highest mean interglacial nitrous oxide concentrations of 280 parts per billion by volume are observed during the interglacial corresponding to Marine Isotope Stage 11 around 400,000 years before present, at the same time when carbon dioxide and methane reach maximum mean interglacial concentrations. The temperature reconstruction at Dome C indicates colder interglacials between 800,000 and 440,000 years before present compared to the interglacials of the last 440,000 years. In contrast to carbon dioxide and methane, which both respond with lower concentrations at lower temperatures, nitrous oxide shows mean interglacial concentrations of 4 19 parts per billion by volume higher than the preindustrial Holocene value during the interglacials corresponding to Marine Isotope Stage 9 19. At the end of most interglacials, nitrous oxide remains substantially longer on interglacial levels than methane. Nevertheless, nitrous oxide shows millennial-scale variations at the same time as methane throughout the last 800,000 years. We suggest that these millennial-scale variations have been driven by a similar mechanism as the Dansgaard/Oeschger events known from the last glacial. Our data lead to the hypothesis that emissions from the low latitudes drive past variations of the atmospheric nitrous oxide concentration.
    N2O

42. [Schmidt 2010]
    ABSTRACT: I discuss the role of model/data comparisons for past climate changes and use of such comparisons for enhancing credibility in future projections. I outline a framework in which data synthesis combined with suitable modelling targets should be able to reduce uncertainty in both. By focusing on areas that the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report (IPCC AR4) highlighted as being particularly uncertain in future projections, or where current models produce a very wide range of responses, the relevance of palaeoclimate data could be greatly enhanced. Specific targets include: the long-term behaviour of El Nin o events and the potential response to volcanic and solar forcing; the variability of subtropical rainfall and the extent of the Hadley Circulation and their response to orbital and high-latitude forcing; ice sheet responses on submillennial timescales; multidecadal changes in the North Atlantic ocean circulation and, certainly, overall climate sensitivity. In each case, I highlight data synthesis steps and modelling approaches necessary for reducing the uncertainty. In particular, I stress the need for coordinated model simulation archives that are conformal to those used in simulations of the 20th century and beyond and the consistency of models used for past and future climate simulations.
    Past 2 future model-data paleo comparison

43. [Schmittner and Galbraith 2010]
    Earth s climate and the concentrations of the atmospheric greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O) varied strongly on millennial timescales during past glacial periods. Large and rapid warming events in Greenland and the North Atlantic were followed by more gradual cooling, and are highly correlated with fluctuations of N2O as recorded in ice cores. Antarctic temperature variations, on the other hand, were smaller and more gradual, showed warming during the Greenland cold phase and cooling while the North Atlantic was warm, and were highly correlated with fluctuations in CO2. Abrupt changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) have often been invoked to explain the physical characteristics of these Dansgaard Oeschger climate oscillations1 3, but the mechanisms for the greenhouse-gas variations and their linkage to the AMOC have remained unclear4 8. Here we present simulations with a coupled model of glacial climate and biogeochemical cycles, forced only with changes in the AMOC. The model simultaneously reproduces characteristic features of the Dansgaard Oeschger temperature, as well as CO2 and N2O fluctuations. Despite significant changes in the land carbon inventory,CO2 variations on millennial timescales are dominated by slow changes in the deep ocean inventory of biologically sequestered carbon and are correlated with Antarctic temperature and SouthernOcean stratification. In contrast, N2O co-varies more rapidly with Greenland temperatures owing to fast adjustments of the thermocline oxygen budget. These results suggest that ocean circulation changes were the primary mechanism that drove glacial CO2 and N2O fluctuations on millennial timescales.
    N2O, CO2, glacial millennial changes

44. [Seneviratne et al. 2010]
    abstract = Soil moisture is a key variable of the climate system. It constrains plant transpiration and photosynthesis in several regions of the world, with consequent impacts on the water, energy and biogeochemical cycles. Moreover it is a storage component for precipitation and radiation anomalies, inducing persistence in the climate system. Finally, it is involved in a number of feedbacks at the local, regional and global scales, and plays a major role in climate-change projections. In this review, we provide a synthesis of past research on the role of soil moisture for the climate system, based both on modelling and observational studies. We focus on soil moisture–temperature and soil moisture–precipitation feedbacks, and their possible modifications with climate change. We also highlight further impacts of soil moisture on climate, and the state of research regarding the validation of the relevant processes. There are promises for major advances in this research field in coming years thanks to the development of new validation datasets and multi-model initiatives. However, the availability of ground observations continues to be critical in limiting progress and should therefore strongly be fostered at the international level. Exchanges across disciplines will also be essential for bridging current knowledge gaps in this field. This is of key importance given the manifold impacts of soil moisture on climate, and their relevance for climate-change projections. A better understanding and quantification of the relevant processes would significantly help to reduce uncertainties in future-climate scenarios, in particular with regard to changes in climate variability and extreme events, as well as ecosystem and agricultural impacts
    land atmosf interactions

45. [Servonat et al. 2010]
    Abstract. Studying the climate of the last millennium gives the possibility to deal with a relatively well-documented climate essentially driven by natural forcings. We have performed two simulations with the IPSLCM4 climate model to evaluate the impact of Total Solar Irradiance (TSI), CO2 and orbital forcing on secular temperature variability during the preindustrial part of the last millennium. The Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature of the simulation reproduces the amplitude of the NH temperature reconstructions over the last millennium. Using a linear statistical decomposition we evaluated that TSI and CO2 have similar contributions to secular temperature variability between 1425 and 1850 AD. They generate a temperature minimum comparable to the Little Ice Age shown by the temperature reconstructions. Solar forcing explains 80$\%$ of the NH temperature variability during the first part of the millennium (1000 1425 AD) including the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA). It is responsible for a warm period which occurs two centuries later than in the reconstructions. This mismatch implies that the secular variability during the MCA is not fully explained by the response of the model to the TSI reconstruction. With a signal-noise ratio (SNR) estimate we found that the temperature signal of the forced simulation is significantly different from internal variability over area wider than 5.106 km2, i.e. approximately the extent of Europe. Orbital forcing plays a significant role in latitudes higher than 65 N in summer and supports the conclusions of a recent study on an Arctic temperature reconstruction over past two millennia. The forced variability represents at least half of the temperature signal on only 30$\%$ of the surface of the globe. This study suggests that regional reconstructions of the temperature between 1000 and 1850 AD are likely to show weak signatures of solar, CO2 and orbital forcings compared to internal variability.
    Last millennium climate, impact of forcings

46. [Simolo et al. 2010]
    We investigate changes in the probability density functions and the probability of moderate extremes for maximum and minimum daily temperature anomalies in Italy from 1951 up to 2008. Evaluation of trends in time¿varying percentiles and higher¿moment analysis of empirical density functions give no evidence of long¿term changes in scale or shape of daily anomaly distributions, their temporal evolution being essentially driven by a forward, nonuniform shift in the mean. In this context, on the basis of an appropriate theoretical model for daily anomalies, we provide a realistic representation of the temporal evolution of moderate warm and cold extremes by explicitly considering the inherent nonlinearity between changes in the mean and those in exceedance probabilities. Consistency between expected and observed exceedance probabilities suggests that changes in moderate extremes can be well understood with a simple, rigid shift of the density functions alone, without invoking any change in shape.
    Changes in temperature distribution in Italy, climate change

47. [Smerdon et al. 2010]
    Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is evaluated for paleoclimate field reconstructions in the context of pseudoproxy experiments assembled fromthemillennial integration (850 1999 C.E.) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Climate System Model, version 1.4. A parsimonious method for selecting the order of theCCAmodel is presented.Results suggest that the method is capable of resolving multiple (3 13) climatic patterns given the estimated proxy observational network and the amount of observational uncertainty. CCA reconstructions are compared to those derived from the regularized expectation maximization method using ridge regression regularization (RegEM-Ridge). CCA and RegEM-Ridge yield similar skill patterns that are characterized by high correlation regions collocated with dense pseudoproxy sampling areas in North America and Europe. Both methods also produce reconstructions characterized by spatially variable warm biases and variance losses, particularly at high pseudoproxy noise levels. RegEM-Ridge in particular is subject to significantly larger variance losses thanCCA, even though the spatial correlation patterns of the twomethods are comparable. Results collectively indicate the importance of evaluating the field performance of methods that target spatial climate patterns during the last several millennia and indicate that the results of currently available climate field reconstructions should be interpreted carefully.
    CFR tests, regem, cca

48. [von Storch 2010]
    Modeling is a central concept, a central tool in climate research. This editorial treats briefly a number of issues relevant or the understanding of models and their usage in the field of climate research
    Models, model validation.

49. [Svalgaard and Cliver 2010]
    We use recently acquired geomagnetic archival data to extend our long term reconstruction of the heliospheric magnetic field (HMF) strength. The 1835 2009 HMF series is based on an updated and substantiated InterDiurnal Variability (IDV) series from 1872 onwards and on Bartels  extension, by proxy, of his u series from 1835 to 1871. The new IDV series, termed IDV09, has excellent agreement (R2 = 0.98; RMS = 0.3 nT) with the earlier IDV05 series, and also with the negative component of Love s extended (to 1905) Dst series (R2 = 0.91). Of greatest importance to the community, in an area of research that has been contentious, comparison of the extended HMF series with other recent reconstructions of solar wind B for the last ca 100 years yields a strong consensus between series based on geomagnetic data. Differences exist from ca. 1900 1910 but they are far smaller than the previous disagreement for this key interval of low solar wind B values which closely resembles current solar activity. Equally encouraging, a discrepancy with an HMF reconstruction based on 10Be data for the first half of the 20th century has largely been removed by a revised 10Be based reconstruction published after we submitted this paper, although a remaining discrepancy for the years ca. 1885 1905 will need to be resolved.
    Solar magnetic field, 20th century

50. [Swingedow et al. 2010]
    Abstract The variability of the climate during the last millennium is partly forced by changes in total solar irradiance (TSI). Nevertheless, the amplitude of these TSI changes is very small so that recent reconstruction data suggest that low frequency variations in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and in the thermohaline circulation may have amplified, in the North Atlantic sector and mostly in winter, the radiative changes due to TSI variations. In this study we use a state-of-the-art climate model to simulate the last millennium. We find that modelled variations of surface temperature in the Northern Hemisphere are coherent with existing reconstructions. Moreover, in the model, the low frequency variability of this mean hemispheric temperature is found to be correlated at 0.74 with the solar forcing for the period 1001 1860. Then, we focus on the regional climatic fingerprint of solar forcing in winter and find a significant relationship between the low frequency TSI forcing and the NAO with a time lag of more than 40 years for the response of the NAO. Such a lag is larger than the around 20-year lag suggested in other studies.Weargue that this lag is due, in the model, to a northward shift of the tropical atmospheric convection in the Pacific Ocean, which is maximum more than four decades after the solar forcing increase. This shift then forces a positive NAO through an atmospheric wave connection related to the jet-stream wave guide. The shift of the tropical convection is due to the persistence of anomalous warm SST forcing the anomalous precipitation, associated with the advection of warm SST by the North Pacific subtropical gyre in a few decades. Finally, we analyse the response of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation to solar forcing and find that the former is weakened when the latter increases. Changes in wind stress, notably due to the NAO, modify the barotropic streamfunction in the Atlantic 50 years after solar variations. This implies a wind-driven modification of the oceanic circulation in the Atlantic sector in response to changes in solar forcing, in addition to the variations of the thermohaline circulation.
    Last millennium climate, forcing.

51. [Tingley and Huybers 2010a]
    Bayesian approach to climate reconstruction. Implementation
    Climate field reconstructions, bayesian methods

52. [Tingley and Huybers 2010b]
    Bayesian approach to climate reconstruction. Comparison to Regem
    Climate field reconstructions, bayesian methods

53. [Trenberth et al. 2010]
    Atmospheric reanalyses have greatly improved our ability to analyse past climate variability. Further improvements to reanalyses, including expansion to encompass the ocean, land and sea-ice domains, hold promise for extending their use in climate change studies, research and applications. Other developments, such as the assimilation of observed cloud and coupled reanalysis, are needed before the considerable potential for providing reliable surface fluxes for the ocean is realized.
    Reanalyses

54. [Trenberth and Fasullo 2010]
    By measuring the net radiative incom- ing and outgoing energy at the top of Earth’s atmosphere, it is possible to determine how much energy remains in the Earth system. But where exactly does the energy go? The main energy reservoir is the ocean, which sequesters energy as heat.
    Radiative ballance

55. [Vinther et al. 2010]
    Twenty ice cores drilled in medium to high accumulation areas of the Greenland ice sheet have been used to extract seasonally resolved stable isotope records. Relationships between the seasonal stable isotope data and Greenland and Icelandic temperatures as well as atmospheric flow are investigated for the past 150 200 years. The winter season stable isotope data are found to be influenced by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and very closely related to SW Greenland temperatures. The linear correlation between the first principal component of the winter season stable isotope data and Greenland winter temperatures is 0.71 for seasonally resolved data and 0.83 for decadally filtered data. The summer season stable isotope data display higher correlations with Stykkisholmur summer temperatures and North Atlantic SST conditions than with SW Greenland temperatures. The linear correlation between Stykkisholmur summer temperatures and the first principal component of the summer season stable isotope data is 0.56, increasing to 0.66 for decadally filtered data. Winter season stable isotope data from ice core records that reach more than 1400 years back in time suggest that the warm period that began in the 1920s raised southern Greenland temperatures to the same level as those that prevailed during the warmest intervals of the MedievalWarm Period some 900  1300 years ago. This observation is supported by a southern Greenland ice core borehole temperature inversion. As Greenland borehole temperature inversions are found to correspond better with winter stable isotope data than with summer or annual average stable isotope data it is suggested that a strong local Greenland temperature signal can be extracted from the winter stable isotope data even on centennial to millennial time scales.
    Last millennium, Greenland, North Atlantic

56. [Wang et al. 2010]
    Abstract: We present a 650-year Antarctic ice core record of concentration and isotopic ratios (d13C and d18O) of atmospheric carbon monoxide. Concentrations decreased by 25 % (14 parts per billion by volume) from the mid-1300s to the 1600s then recovered completely by the late 1800s. d13C and d18O decreased by about 2 and 4 per mil (‰), respectively, from the mid-1300s to the 1600s then increased by about 2.5 and 4‰ by the late 1800s. These observations and isotope mass balance model results imply that large variations in the degree of biomass burning in the Southern Hemisphere occurred during the last 650 years, with a decrease by about 50 % in the 1600s, an increase of about 100 % by the late 1800s, and another decrease by about 70 % from the late 1800s to present day.

57. [Widmann et al. 2010]
    Abstract. Climate proxy data provide noisy, and spatially incomplete information on some aspects of past climate states, whereas palaeosimulations with climate models provide global, multi-variable states, which may however differ from the true states due to unpredictable internal variability not related to climate forcings, as well as due to model deficiencies. Using data assimilation for combining the empirical information from proxy data with the physical understanding of the climate system represented by the equations in a climate model is in principle a promising way to obtain better estimates for the climate of the past. Data assimilation has been used for a long time in weather forecasting and atmospheric analyses to control the states in atmospheric General Circulation Models such that they are in agreement with observation from surface, upper air, and satellite measurements. Here we discuss the similarities and the differences between the data assimilation problem in palaeoclimatology and in weather forecasting, and present and conceptually compare three data assimilation methods that have been developed in recent years for applications in palaeoclimatology. All three methods (selection of ensemble members, Forcing Singular Vectors, and Pattern Nudging) are illustrated by examples that are related to climate variability over the extratropical Northern Hemisphere during the last millennium. In particular it is shown that all three methods suggest that the cold period over Scandinavia during 1790 1820 is linked to anomalous northerly or easterly atmospheric flow, which in turn is related to a pressure anomaly that resembles a negative state of the Northern Annular Mode.
    Data assimilation, last millennium

58. [Visser et al. 2010]
    Abstract. Evidence has been found for reduced sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in a number of forests at high northern latitudes and alpine locations. Furthermore, at some of these sites, emergent subpopulations of trees show negative growth trends with rising temperature. These findings are typically referred to as the Divergence Problem  (DP). Given the high relevance of paleoclimatic reconstructions for policy-related studies, it is important for dendrochronologists to address this issue of potential model uncertainties associated with the DP. Here we address this issue by proposing a calibration technique, termed stochastic response function  (SRF), which allows the presence or absence of any instabilities in growth response of trees (or any other climate proxy) to their calibration target to be visualized and detected. Since this framework estimates confidence limits and subsequently provides statistical significance tests, the approach is also very well suited for proxy screening prior to the generation of a climate-reconstruction network. Two examples of tree growth/climate relationships are provided, one from the North American Arctic treeline and the other from the upper treeline in the European Alps. Instabilities were found to be present where stabilities were reported in the literature, and vice versa, stabilities were found where instabilities were reported. We advise to apply SRFs in future proxy-screening schemes, next to the use of correlations and RE/CE statistics. It will improve the strength of reconstruction hindcasts.
    tree ring divergence, screening

59. [Wolff et al. 2010]
    The oxygen-isotope records from Greenland ice cores show a very strong, reproducible pattern of alternation between warm Greenland Interstadials (GI) and cold Greenland Stadials (GS) at millennialscale during the last glacial period. Here we summarise what is known about this variability from ice core records. The typical cycle has a sawtooth pattern, with a very rapid warming event (occurring in a few decades), a slow cooling trend, and then a final fast cooling. 25 such events have been numbered in the last glacial. The recent GICC05 age scale provides the best available age scale that can be directly applied to this stratigraphy, and we summarise the timing of the warming events, and the length and strength of each event. The Greenland stratigraphy can be transferred to other records if we make assumptions about the contemporaneous nature of rapid events in different archives. Other parameters, such as the snow accumulation rate, and the concentration of terrestrial dust and sea salt recorded in the Greenland cores, also show a strong contrasting pattern between GI and GS. Methane concentrations are generally high during GI and lower during GS, with the increase from GS to GI occurring within a century. Antarctic ice cores show a different pattern: each GI has an Antarctic counterpart, but Antarctica appears to warm while Greenland is in a GS, and cool during GI. These changes are consistent with a mechanism involving ocean heat transport, but the rapid nature of warmings poses a challenge for modellers, while the rapid methane changes pose questions about the pattern of land biosphere emissions during the glacial that are also relevant for understanding glacial-interglacial methane variability. European Climate reconstruction,
    Greenland, last millennium

60. [Woodhouse et al. 2010]
    A key feature of anticipated 21st century droughts in Southwest North America is the concurrence of elevated temperatures and increased aridity. Instrumental records and paleoclimatic evidence for past prolonged drought in the Southwest that coincide with elevated temperatures can be assessed to provide insights on temperature- drought relations and to develop worst-case scenarios for the future. In particular, during the medieval period, AD 900  1300, the Northern Hemisphere experienced temperatures warmer than all but the most recent decades. Paleoclimatic and model data indicate increased temperatures in western North America of approximately 1 °C over the long-term mean. This was a period of extensive and persistent aridity over western North America. Paleoclimatic evidence suggests drought in the mid-12th century far exceeded the severity, duration, and extent of subsequent droughts. The driest decade of this drought was anomalously warm, though not as warm as the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The convergence of prolonged warming and arid conditions suggests the mid-12th century may serve as a conservative analogue for severe droughts that might occur in the future. The severity, extent, and persistence of the 12th century drought that occurred under natural climate variability, have important implications for water resource management. The causes of past and future drought will not be identical but warm droughts, inferred from paleoclimatic records, demonstrate the plausibility of extensive, severe droughts, provide a long-term perspective on the ongoing drought conditions in the Southwest, and suggest the need for regional sustainability planning for the future.
    Drought, last millennium, North America

61. [Zhang et al. 2010]
    Abstract Based on multiple proxies from the Southern Hemisphere, an austral summer (December-January- February: DJF) Antarctic Oscillation Index (AAO) since 1500 A.D. was reconstructed with a focus on interannual to interdecadal variability (<50 a). By applying a multivariate regression method, the observational AAO-proxy relations were calibrated and cross-validated for the period of 1957-89. The regressions were employed to compute the DJF-AAO index for 1500-1956. To verify the results, the authors checked the explained variance (r2), the reduction of error (RE), and the standard error (SE). Cross-validation was performed by applying a leave-one-out validation method. Over the entire reconstruction period, the mean values of r2, RE, and SE are 59.9%, 0.47, and 0.67, respectively. These statistics indicate that the DJF-AAO reconstruction is relatively skillful and reliable for the last 460 years. The reconstructed AAO variations on the interannual and interdecadal timescales compare favorably with those of several shorter sea level pressure (SLP)-based AAO indices. The leading periods of the DJF-AAO index over the last 500 years are  2.4, 2.6, 6.3, 24.1, and 37.6 years, all of which are significant at the 95analysis. jfgr
    AAO reconstruction, multiproxy