Publication:
European summer temperatures since Roman times

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Full text at PDC
Publication Date
2016-02
Authors
González Rouco, J. Fidel
otros, ...
Advisors (or tutors)
Editors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IOP Publishing Ltd
Citations
Google Scholar
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Abstract
The spatial context is criticalwhen assessing present-day climate anomalies, attributing them to potential forcings and making statements regarding their frequency and severity in a long-term perspective. Recent international initiatives have expanded the number of high-quality proxy-records and developed new statistical reconstruction methods. These advances allow more rigorous regional past temperature reconstructions and, in turn, the possibility of evaluating climate models on policy-relevant, spatiotemporal scales. Here we provide a new proxy-based, annually-resolved, spatial reconstruction of the European summer (June-August) temperature fields back to 755 CE based on Bayesian hierarchical modelling (BHM), together with estimates of the European mean temperature variation since 138 BCE based on BHM and composite-plus-scaling (CPS). Our reconstructions compare well with independent instrumental and proxy-based temperature estimates, but suggest a larger amplitude in summer temperature variability than previously reported. Both CPS and BHM reconstructions indicate that the mean 20th century European summer temperature was not significantly different from some earlier centuries, including the 1st, 2nd, 8th and 10th centuries CE. The 1st century (in BHM also the 10th century) may even have been slightly warmer than the 20th century, but the difference is not statistically significant. Comparing each 50 yr period with the 1951-2000 period reveals a similar pattern. Recent summers, however, have been unusually warm in the context of the last two millennia and there are no 30 yr periods in either reconstruction that exceed the mean average European summer temperature of the last 3 decades (1986-2015 CE). A comparison with an ensemble of climate model simulations suggests that the reconstructed European summer temperature variability over the period 850-2000 CE reflects changes in both internal variability and external forcing on multi-decadal time-scales. For pan-European temperatures we find slightly better agreement between the reconstruction and the model simulations with high-end estimates for total solar irradiance. Temperature differences between the medieval period, the recent period and the Little Ice Age are larger in the reconstructions than the simulations. This may indicate inflated variability of the reconstructions, a lack of sensitivity and processes to changes in external forcing on the simulated European climate and/or an underestimation of internal variability on centennial and longer time scales.
Description
© 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd. Artículo firmado por 45 autores. Support for PAGES 2k activities is provided by the US and Swiss National Science Foundations, US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. JPW acknowledges support from the Centre of Climate Dynamics (SKD), Bergen. The work of OB, SW and EZ is part of CLISAP. JL, SW, EZ, JPW, JGN, OB also acknowledge support by the German Science Foundation Project 'Precipitation in the past millennia in Europe-Extension back to Roman times'. MB acknowledges the Catalan Meteorological Survey (SMC), National Programme I + D, Project CGL2011-28255. PD and RB acknowledge support from the Czech Science Foundation project no. GA13-04291S. VK was supported by Russian Science Foundation (grant 14-19-00765) and the Russian Foundation for Humanities (grants 15-07-00012, 15-37-11129). GH and AS are supported by the ERC funded project TITAN (EC-320691). GH was further funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Royal Society as a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (WM130060) holder. NY is funded by the LOEWE excellence cluster FACE2-FACE of the Hessen State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts; HZ acknowledge support from the DFG project AFICHE. Lamont contribution #7961. The reconstructions can be downloaded from the NOAA paleoclimate homepage: www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/19600. LFD, EGB and JFGR were supported by grants CGL2011-29677-c02-02 and CGL2014-599644-R. All authors are part of the Euro-Med 2k Consortium.
Unesco subjects
Keywords
Citation
Alexander M A, Kilbourne K H and Nye J A 2014 Climate variability during warm and cold phases of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) 1871–2008 J. Mar. Syst. 133 14–26 Barboza L, Li B, Tingely M and Viens F 2014 Reconstructing past climate from natural proxies and estimated climate forcings using short-and long-memory models Ann. Appl. Stat. 8 1966–2001 Barriopedro D, Fischer E M, Luterbacher J, Trigo R M and García Herrera R 2011 The hot summer of 2010: redrawing the temperature record map of Europe Science 332 220–4 Beniston M 2004 The 2003 heat wave in Europe, a shape of things to come? Geophys. Res. Lett. 31 L02022 Beniston M 2015 Ratios of record high to record low temperatures in Europe exhibit sharp increases since 2000 despite a slowdown in the rise of mean temperatures Clim. Change 129 225–37 Bothe O, Jungclaus J H and Zanchettin D 2013a Consistency of the multi-model CMIP5/PMIP3-past1000 ensemble Clim. Past 9 2471–87 Bothe O, Jungclaus J H, Zanchettin D and Zorita E 2013b Climate of the last millennium: ensemble consistency of simulations and reconstructions Clim. Past 9 1089–110 Braconnot P, Harrison S P, Kageyama M, Bartlein P J, Masson-Delmotte V, Abe-Ouchi A, Otto-Bliesner B L and Zhao Y 2012 Evaluation of climate models using paleoclimate data Nat. Clim. Change 2 417–24 Briffa K R, Jones P D, Bartholin T S, Eckstein D, Schweingruber F H, Karlén W, Zetterberg P and Eronen M 1992 Fennoscandian summers from AD 500: temperature changes on short and long timescales Clim. Dyn. 7 111–9 Briffa K R, Osborn T J and Schweingruber F H 2004 Large-scale temperature inferences from tree rings: a reviewGlob. Planet. Change 40 11–26 Büntgen U, Frank D C, Nievergelt D and Esper J 2006 Summer temperature variations in the European Alps, AD 755–2004 J. Clim. 19 5606–23 Büntgen U et al 2011 2500 years of European climate variability and human susceptibility Science 331 578–82 Büntgen U, Frank D C, Neuenschwander T and Esper J 2012 Fading temperature sensitivity of Alpine tree grow at its Mediterranean margin and associated effects on large-scale climate reconstructions Clim. Change 114 651–66 Büntgen U, Kyncl T, Ginzler C, Jacks D S, Esper J, Tegel W, Heussner K U and Kyncl J 2013 Filling the Eastern European gap in millennium-long temperature reconstructions Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110 1773–8 Büntgen Uet al 2016 Cooling and societal change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age (536 to around 660 CE) Nat. Geosci. (doi:10.1038/NGEO2652) Christiansen B and Ljungqvist F C 2012 The extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere temperature in the last two millennia: reconstructions of low-frequency variability Clim. Past 8 765–86 Christidis N, Stott P A, Jones G S, Shiogama H, Nozawa T and Luterbacher J 2012 Human activity and warm seasons in Europe Int. J. Climatol. 32 225–39 Christidis N, Jones G S and Stott P A 2015 Dramatically increasing chance of extremely hot summers since the 2003 European heatwave Nat. Clim. Change 5 46–50 Coats S, Smerdon J E, Cook B I and Seager R 2015 Are simulated megadroughts in the North American Southwest forced? J. Clim. 28 124–42 Della-Marta P M, Haylock M R, Luterbacher J and Wanner H 2007 Doubled length of Western European summer heat waves since 1880 J. Geophys. Res. 112 D15103 D’Arrigo R, Wilson R and Jacoby G 2006 On the long-term context for late 20th century warming J. Geophys. Res. 111 D03103 Deser C, Knutti R, Solomon S and Phillips A S 2012 Communication of the role of natural variability in future North American climate Nat. Clim. Change 2 775–9 Dobrovolný P et al 2010 Temperature reconstruction of Central Europe derived from documentary evidence since AD 1500 Clim. Change 101 69–107 Dorado Liñán Iet al 2012 Estimating 750 years of temperature variations and uncertainties in the pyrenees by tree-ring reconstructions and climate simulations Clim. Past 8 919–33 Esper J, Cook E and Schweingruber F H 2002 Low-frequency signals in long tree-ring chronologies for reconstructing past temperature variability Science 295 2250–3 Esper J and Frank D C 2009 IPCC on heterogeneous medieval warm period Clim. Change 94 267–73 Esper Jet al 2012 Orbital forcing of tree-ring data Nat. Clim. Change 2 862–6 Esper J, Schneider L, Krusic P J, Luterbacher J, Büntgen U, Timonen M, Sirocko F and Zorita E 2013 European summer temperature response to annually dated volcanic eruptions over the past nine centuries Bull. Volcanol. 75 736 Esper J, Düthorn E, Krusic P, Timonen M and Büntgen U 2014 Northern European summer temperature variations over the Common Era from integrated tree-ring density records J. Quat. Sci. 29 487–94 Fernández Donado L et al 2013 Large-scale temperature response to external forcing in simulations and reconstructions of the last millennium Clim. Past 9 393–421 Fernández Donado L, González Rouco J F, García Bustamante E, Smerdon J S, Phipps S J, Luterbacher J and Raible C C 2015 Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions: ensemble uncertainties and their influence on model-data comparisons Geophys. Res. Lett. in revision Fischer E M, Luterbacher J, Zorita E, Tett S F B, Casty C and Wanner H 2007 European climate response to tropical volcanic eruptions over the last half millenium Geophys. Res. Lett. 34 L05707 Frank D, Esper J and Cook E R 2007 Adjustment for proxy number and coherence in a large-scale temperature reconstruction Geophys. Res. Lett. 34 L16709 Frank D, Esper J, Zorita E and Wilson R J S 2010 A noodle, hockey stick, and spaghetti plate: a perspective on high-resolution paleoclimatology WIREs Clim. Change 1 507–16 García Herrera R et al 2010 A review of the European summer heatwave of 2003 Crit. Rev. Environ. Sci. Technol. 40 267-306 Ge Q, Zheng J, Fang X, Man Z, Zhang X, Zhang P and Wang W-C 2003 Winter half-year temperature reconstruction for the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River and Yangtze River, China, during the past 2000 years Holocene 13 933–40 Goosse H, Guiot J, Mann M E, Dubinkina S and Sallaz-Damaz Y 2012a The Medieval Climate Anomaly in Europe: comparison of the summer and annual mean signals in two reconstructions and in simulations with data assimilation Glob. Planet. Change 84–85 35–47 Goosse H, Crespin E, Dubinkina S, Loutre M F, Mann M E, Renssen H, Sallaz-Damaz Y and Shindell D 2012b The role of forcing and internal dynamics in explaining the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ Clim. Dyn. 39 2847–286 Guiot J, Corona C and (ESCARSEL members) 2010 Growing season temperatures in Europe and climate forcings over the past 1400 Years PLoS One 5 e9972 Gray L Jet al 2010 Solar influences on climate Rev. Geophys. 48 RG4001 Guillot D, Rajaratnam B and Emile-Geay J 2015 Statistical paleoclimate reconstructions via Markov random fields Ann. Appl. Stat. 9 324–52 Gunnarson B E, Linderholm H W and Moberg A 2011 Improving a tree-ring reconstruction from West-central Scandinavia— 900 years of warm-season temperatures Clim. Dyn. 36 97–108 Hegerl G, Luterbacher J, González Rouco F J, Tett S F B, Crowley T and Xoplaki E 2011 Influence of human and natural forcing on European seasonal temperatures Nat. Geosci. 4 99–103 Ineson S et al 2015 Regional climate impacts of a possible future grand solar minimum Nat. Commun. 6 7535 IPCC 2012 Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation A Special Report of Working Groups I and II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ed C B Field et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) p 582 Jansen E et al 2007 Paleoclimate: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change University Press Jones P D et al 2009 High-resolution palaeoclimatology of the last millennium: a review of current status and future prospects Holocene 19 3–49 Jones P D, Lister D H, Osborn T J, Harpham C, Salmon M and Morice C P 2012 Hemispheric and large-scale land-surface air temperature variations: an extensive revision and an update to 2010 J. Geophys. Res. 117 D05127 Kerr R 2000 A North Atlantic climate pacemaker for the centuries Science 288 1984–6 Klimenko V V and Sleptsov AM 2003 Multiproxy reconstruction of the climate of Eastern Europe during the last 2,000 years Izvestiya of the Russian Geographical Society 6 45–54 (in Russian) Lavigne F et al 2013 Source of the great A.D. 1257 mystery eruption unveiled, Samalas volcano, Rinjani Volcanic Complex, Indonesia Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110 16742–7 Liu Z, Henderson A C G and Huang Y 2006 Alkenone-based reconstruction of late-Holocene surface temperature and salinity changes in Lake Qinghai, ChinaGeophys. Res. Lett. 33 L09707 Ljungqvist F C, Krusic P J, Brattström G and Sundqvist H S 2012 Northern Hemisphere temperature patterns in the last 12 centuries Clim. Past 8 227–49 Luterbacher J, Dietrich D, Xoplaki E, Grosjean M and Wanner H 2004 European seasonal and annual temperature variability, trends, and extremes since 1500 Science 303 1499–503 Mahlstein I, Knutti R, Solomon S and Portmann R W 2011 Early onset of significant local warming in low latitude countries Environ. Res. Lett. 6 034009 Masson-Delmotte Vet al 2013 Information from Paleoclimate Archives In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ed T F Stockeret al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) McShane B B and Wyner A J 2011 A statistical analysis of multiple temperature proxies: are reconstructions of surface temperatures over the last 1000 years reliable? Ann. Appl. Statist. 5 5–44 Melvin T M, Grudd H and Briffa K R 2013 Potential bias in ‘updating’ tree-ring chronologies using regional curve standardisation: re-processing 1500 years of Torneträsk density and ring-width data The Holocene 23 364–73 Mitchell D M et al 2015 Solar signals in CMIP-5 simulations: the stratospheric pathway Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 141 2390-403 Moberg A, Sundberg R, Grudd H and Hind A 2015 Statistical framework for evaluation of climate model simulations by use of climate proxy data from the last millennium: III. Practical considerations, relaxed assumptions, and using tree-ring data to address the amplitude of solar forcing Clim. Past 11 425–48 Moore J J, Hughen K A, Miller G H and Overpeck J T 2001 Little Ice Age recorded in summer temperature reconstruction from varved sediments of Donard Lake, Baffin Island, Canada J. Paleolimn. 25 503–17 Neukom R et al 2014 Inter-hemispheric temperature variability over the past millennium Nat. Clim. Change 4 362–7 North G R, Moeng F J, Bell T L and Cahalan R F 1982 The latitude dependence of the variance of zonally averaged quantities Mon. Wea. Rev. 110 319–26 PAGES 2k Consortium 2013 Continental-scale temperature variability during the last two millennia Nat. Geosci. 6 339–46 PAGES 2k Consortium 2014 PAGES 2k—a framework for community-driven climate reconstructions during the past two millennia EOS 95 361–3 PAGES 2k-PMIP3 group 2015 Continental-scale temperature variability in PMIP3 simulations and PAGES 2k regional temperature reconstructions over the past millennium Clim. Past 11 1673–99 Popa I and Kern Z 2009 Long-term summer temperature reconstruction inferred from tree-ring records from the Eastern Carpathians Clim. Dyn. 32 1107–17 Rahmstorf S and Coumou D 2011 Increase of extreme events in a warming world Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 108 17905–9 Russo S, Sillmann J and Fischer E M 2015 Top ten European heatwaves since 1950 and their occurrence in the coming decades Environ. Res. Lett. 10 124003 Schär C, Vidale P L, Lüthi D, Frei C, Häberli C, Liniger M and Appenzeller C 2004 The role of increasing temperature variability in European summer heatwaves Nature 427 332–6 Schmidt G A et al 2011 Climate forcing reconstructions for use in PMIP simulations of the last millennium Geosci. Mod. Dev. 4 33–45 Schmidt G A et al 2012 Climate forcing reconstructions for use in PMIP simulations of the last millennium Geosci. Mod. Dev. 5 185–91 Schmidt G A et al 2014 Using palaeo-climate comparisons to constrain future projections in CMIP5 Clim. Past 10 221–50 Schneider T 2001 Analysis of incomplete climate data: estimation of mean values and covariance matrices and imputation of missing valuesJ. Clim. 14 853–71 Schneider L, Smerdon J E, Büntgen U, Wilson R J S, Myglan V S, Kirdyanov A V and Esper J 2015 Revising mid-latitude summer-temperatures back to AD 600 based on a wood density network Geophys. Res. Lett. 42 4556–62 Schurer A, Tett S F B and HegerlGC 2014 Small influence of solar variability on climate over the last millennium Nat. Geosci. 7 104–8 Seim A, Büntgen U, Fonti P, Haska H, Herzig F, Tegel W, Trouet V and Treydte K 2012 The paleoclimatic potential of a millennium-long tree-ring width chronology from Albania Clim. Res. 51 217–28 Sigl M et al 2015 Timing and global climate forcing of volcanic eruptions during the past 2500 years Nature 523 543–9 Smerdon J E 2012 Climate models as a test bed for climate reconstruction methods: pseudoproxy experiments WIREs Clim. Change 3 63–77 Solanki S, Usoskin I, Kromer B, Schüssler M and Beer J 2004 Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11 000 years Nature 431 1084–7 Solomina O N et al 2015 Holocene glacier fluctuations Quat. Sci. Rev. 111 9–34 Steinhilber F, Beer J and Fröhlich C 2009 Total solar irradiance during the Holocene Geophys. Res. Lett. 36 L19704 Steinhilber F et al 2012 9400 years of cosmic radiation and solar activity from ice cores and tree rings Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109 5967–71 Stoffel M et al 2015 Estimates of volcanic-induced cooling in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1500 years Nat. Geosci. 8 784–8 Stott P A, Stone D A and Allen M R 2004 Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003 Nature 432 610–4 Taylor K E, Stouffer R J and Meehl G A 2012 An overview of CMIP5 and the experiment design Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 93 485–98 Thompson L G, Mosley-Thompson E, Davis M E, Lin P N, Henderson K and Mashiotta T A 2003 Tropical glacier and ice core evidence of climate change on annual to millennial time scales Clim. Change 59 137–55 Tingley M P and Huybers P 2010a A Bayesian algorithm for reconstructing climate anomalies in space and time: I. Development and applications to paleoclimate reconstructions problems J. Clim. 23 2759–81 Tingley M P and Huybers P 2010b A Bayesian algorithm for reconstructing climate anomalies in space and time: II. Comparison with the regularized expectation-maximization algorithm J. Clim. 23 2782–800 Tingley M and Huybers P 2013 Recent temperature extremes at high Northern latitudes unprecedented in the past 600 years Nature 496 201–5 Tingley M, Craigmile P, Haran M, Li B, Mannshardt E and Rajaratnam B 2015 On discriminating between GCM forcing configurations using Bayesian reconstructions of Late Holocene temperatures J. Clim. 28 8264–81 Werner J P and Tingley M P 2015 Technical note: probabilistically constraining proxy age-depth models within a Bayesian hierarchical reconstruction model Clim. Past 11 533–45 Werner J P, Luterbacher J and Smerdon J E 2013 A pseudoproxy evaluation of Bayesian hierarchical modelling and canonical correlation analysis for climate field reconstructions over Europe J. Clim. 26 851–67 Werner J P, Toreti A and Luterbacher J 2014 Stochastic models for climate reconstructions—how wrong is too wrong? Nolta. Proc. 24 528–31 Zanchettin D, Rubino A, Matei D, Bothe O and Jungclaus J H 2013a Multidecadal-to-centennial SST variability in the MPI ESM simulation ensemble for the last millennium Clim. Dyn. 40 1301–18 Zanchettin D, Bothe O, Graf H F, Lorenz S J, Luterbacher J, Timmreck C and Jungclaus J H 2013b Background conditions influence the decadal climate response to strong volcanic eruptions J. Geophys. Res. Atm. 118 4090–106 Zhang H, Yuan N, Xoplaki E, Werner J P, Büntgen U, Esper J, Treydte K and Luterbacher J 2015 Modified climate with long term memory in tree ring proxies Environ. Res. Lett. 10 084020 Zorita E, González Rouco J F, von Storch H, Montávez J P and Valero F 2005 Natural and anthropogenic modes of surface temperature variations in the last thousand years Geophys. Res. Lett. 32 L08707
Collections