Arctic2k

events

PAGES co-organized session C30 at AGU Fall Meeting

15-19 Dec 2008 - San Francisco, USA

Arctic2k - Assessment of Arctic Climate Records of the Last Two Millennia and their Relevance for Future Warming
Conveners: Nalan Koc, Caspar Ammann, Darrell Kaufman, Pierre Francus

Summer sea ice retreat over the Arctic Basin has accelerated to record levels and a complete loss of the warm season polar sea ice cover appears possible in the not too distant future. Climate models used for future climate change studies generally do not reproduce the magnitude of this observed change. Because the anthropogenic climate change effect comes superposed on natural climate variability, it is very hard to accurately quantify their individual contributions. But the discrepancies between observed and simulated change (even in ensembles) raises questions if our understanding of the sensitivity of the high latitude feedbacks is good enough. This session explores what paleo records can inform the climate change community about the sensitivity of the Arctic climate in pre-industrial times. Through detailed reconstructions of past changes, various paleoclimate archives provide insight into the question of how polar amplification over the past 1-2 millennia has affected this environment and how these natural variations compare with the current trends. We encourage contributions from the full range of high-resolution (annual to multi-decadal) proxy archives, terrestrial as well as marine, to assess and elucidate the timing and variability of arctic climate change during the last two millennia.

Central questions include:
a) Was the 20th century warming of the Arctic unprecedented in the last 2000 yr?
b) What is the multi-decade to century scale variability in arctic climate?
c) What portion of the Arctic-wide and regional temperature changes during the last 2000 yr is explained by changes in solar irradiance and volcanic activity, and what portion is related to internal adjustments of the climate system?

Working Group meeting on Arctic climate during the last two millennia

8 Mar 2008 - Boulder, USA

A one-day long meeting of the Arctic 2k Working Group on "Arctic Climate during the Last 2 Millennia" was held in Boulder Colorado in March 2008, following an INSTAAR Arctic Workshop (http://instaar.colorado.edu/AW). All paleoclimate scientists working in the Arctic with high-resolution data and/ or modeling were invited to contribute to this first Working Group meeting to discuss the following topics:

> Scientific questions
> Organization of subgroups
> Assessment of available data
> Recommendations to cover data gaps
> Discussion on statistical methods
> Next workshop

Click here to find reports from this workshop in Eos and PAGES news.

Upcoming workshops in 2009

The Arctic2k WG will organize three regional reconstruction workshops in 2009:
- Scandinavia-Nordic Seas-Svalbard
- Baffin Bay-Greenland-Iceland
- Northern Pacific-Alaska)

More information to follow.