HR: 08:00h
AN: PP51G-01 [Abstracts]
TI: The Search for Common Signatures From Natural Climate Variations in Reconstructed and Simulated
Climate
AU: * Ammann, C M
EM: ammann@ucar.edu
AF: National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80307-3000
United States
AB:
The capability of General Circulation Models (GCMs) to provide useful information on future regional climate changes depends
strongly on their performance of accurately representing forced changes in the primary modes of interannual climate
variability. Each member of the main suite of these modes operates on a somewhat different time scale. Although the
instrumental record is often too short to identify potential recent changes in a statistically significant way, proxy records
offer valuable ways of extending the series over past centuries to millennia. Despite of the increase in uncertainty
inherent in each of these indirect sources of climate information, the expansion of the time series can contain very powerful
and valuable characteristics of the data that can be exploited by appropriate statistical techniques. Of particular interest
is the realm of the radiatively, yet naturally, driven changes in climate during past centuries, because the recent past
provides the only real-world test bed for verifying potential mechanisms that are directly relevant for understanding the
past as well as for predictions at the level most useful for decision makers (i.e., the regional scale). Therefore, it is the
goal of this presentation to provide a summary of the common as well as the diverging spatio-temporal structures of climate
response to the most likely radiative perturbations of past centuries. Long GCM simulations are used to evaluate the
robustness of the results and to provide a possible perspective on future climate with respect to the historically documented
past.
DE: 0370 Volcanic effects (8409)
DE: 0520 Data analysis: algorithms and implementation
DE: 1635 Oceans (1616, 3305, 4215, 4513)
DE: 1637 Regional climate change
DE: 1650 Solar variability (7537)
SC: Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology [PP]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005