Identifying New Community-Driven Science Themes for NSF's Support of Paleoclimate Research Proceedings of a Workshop (2021) / Chapter Skim
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Resolving Regional Climate Change: Advancing and Synthesizing Knowledge
Resolving Regional Climate Change: Advancing and Synthesizing Knowledge
Pages 47-60
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From page 47... ...
How can insights from hydrologic variability in the past be used to understand responses to future climate change? In order to answer these questions, integrated, multi-proxy datasets that capture spatial variability in hydroclimate would be required, as well as leveraging new tools for quantitative constraints by combining thermodynamically based data with higher resolution biologically based data, Levin said.
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From page 48... ...
Juan Lora, Yale University, drew attention to gaps in understanding of extreme events, which have major impacts from the perspective of regional hydroclimate and habitability, and as other participants have noted, extreme hydroclimate events have particular policy relevance. Lora argued understanding extreme events and their global and regional drivers in warm and cold past climates, particularly beyond the Holocene, is a necessity.
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From page 49... ...
ACCESSING HYDROCLIMATE ARCHIVES AND FOSTERING PROXY INNOVATION Workshop participants and panelists discussed how the range of hydroclimate archives can be used to answer outstanding research questions regarding modes of ocean-atmosphere variability. In the breakout sessions, discussions focused on applications of the following paleoclimate archives for this purpose: ocean, lake, and continental sediment cores; terrestrial outcrops, paleosols, and speleothems; ice cores; and tree rings.
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From page 50... ...
Formed through the annual deposition of snow, ice deposits from mountain glaciers and massive polar ice sheets several kilometers thick contain multiple proxies for past climate variability. While cores of mountain glaciers record up to 10,000 years of climate change, cores recovered from Antarctic ice sheets contain records dating back to ~800,000 years before present.
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From page 51... ...
Participants in the ocean coring and drilling breakout session, moderated by Yair Rosenthal, Rutgers University, and Melissa Berke, University of Notre Dame, identified a range of research questions that can be addressed by ocean coring and drilling tools, including reconstructing large-scale temperature patterns, ocean heat and carbon uptake processes, biogeochemical cycling, atmospheric CO2 variability, reconstructing changes in the hydrologic cycle, changes in ocean circulation, Arctic and Antarctic ice-sheet history, and the BOX 13 Transforming Data Management for Studying Hydroclimate Participants in all of the breakout discussions raised issues of data storage and sharing in the context of accessing hydroclimate archives. Many participants underscored the importance of sample archiving of specimens, data, and metadata, for both current research and future applications.
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From page 52... ...
Outcrops, Paleosols, and Speleothems Two overarching questions discussed in the outcrops and paleosols breakout session, moderated by Katie Snell, University of Colorado, and Jeremy Caves Rugenstein, Colorado State University, were how to best leverage the inherent variability in outcrops and terrestrial sections, and how to best design studies that address paleoclimate questions using records that archive different parameters. Participants in the speleothems breakout session moderated by Kathleen Johnson, University of California, Irvine, and Jessica Oster, Vanderbilt University, discussed how speleothems can address climate questions from the tropics to the polar regions, including moving beyond Intertropical Convergence Zone paradigms and exploring applications for constraining zonal and regional hydroclimate, paleo-ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation)
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From page 53... ...
Thomas called for isotope-enabled climate models that would serve as good priors for data assimilation, better modern observations that can be gridded for the high Arctic latitudes, and a large increase in observation networks for water isotopes, precipitation, soil, lakes, and water vapor. BOX 14 Actionable Steps to Improve Human Infrastructure for Paleoclimate Research The breakout session discussion on human infrastructure, moderated by Deborah Khider, University of Southern California, and Amy Myrbo, Science Museum of Minnesota, focused on action-oriented steps that could be implemented under the NSF P2C2 program.
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From page 54... ...
Connie Woodhouse, University of Arizona, advocated for using tree rings to look more closely at the temperature component of hydroclimate -- specifically, to better understand how temperature interacts with precipitation over time -- drawing attention to the lack of chronologies with independent temperature information available for the mid-latitudes, particularly North America. Woodhouse called for independent proxy records for temperature and precipitation to understand the role of temperature as part of moisturedriven metrics and to answer research questions, such as: How has drought varied over time, what was the role of temperature, is that role changing under current climate, and what is that change in the context of the paleo record?
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From page 55... ...
-- change as a response to changes in background states, providing an opportunity to increase predictive power by understanding how the nature and strength of climate feedbacks change, explained Christina Ravelo, University of California, Santa Cruz. Studying climate modes involves long time series that capture many cycles, as well as records that span a range of background states, including warm periods.
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From page 56... ...
Stevenson called for more high-resolution marine and terrestrial proxy records; long-term in situ monitoring of proxy sites to understand how climate signals are recorded at those sites; an emphasis on water isotope observations both at proxy sites and in a longer-term monitoring context more broadly; and facilitating the ease of use of proxy data for modelers, including working toward the inclusion of isotope-enabled models in standard model versions. Kim Cobb, Georgia Institute of Technology, drew attention to approaches that would bolster the utility of existing paleoclimate archives.
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From page 57... ...
Modeling Needs and Opportunities To advance paleoclimate research capabilities and understand future multicentury changes in the Earth system, Pedro DiNezio, University of Colorado Boulder, discussed the need for a fully configurable Earth system model with expanded functionalities that would include more components of the Earth system, including sediments, soils, the carbon cycle, ice sheets, and vegetation. He noted that it may be essential for such a model to be capable of managing complexity (Held, 2005; Polvani et al., 2017)
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From page 58... ...
. While paleoclimate data assimilation is still in its infancy, and there are challenges to adapting modern data assimilation techniques for the sparse, low-temporal resolution of proxy data, data assimilation has the promise of answering questions about climate variability, such as: What are the mechanisms behind multidecadal variability in the Atlantic?
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From page 59... ...
While participants noted that there are more opportunities to extract value from existing archives, participants in the late Holocene breakout session, moderated by Julie Cole, University of Michigan, and Sloan Coats, University of Hawaii, discussed that new data from tropical Africa, South America, the tropics, and the southern hemisphere is also needed to address outstanding questions about climate modes in the late Holocene. Research questions moving forward could include the following: How can climate modes in the past be distinguished from the background climate state or external forces?
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From page 60... ...
and absolute dating. In the deep time breakout session, moderated by Francis Macdonald, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Matthew Clapham, University of California, Santa Cruz, participants discussed the opportunity to look at the full range of extreme events over long timescales and use events that differ in rates, magnitude, and initial conditions to better understand processes.
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