NOAA Magazine Online (Story 95)

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NOAA PALEOCLIMATOLOGY PROBES THE PAST

Image of the world with the NOAA logo and words "A Paleo Perspective..." over it. May 21, 2003 — Scientists have systematically tracked changes in weather and climate using instruments such as thermometers and rain gauges for only a bit more than a century. Fortunately, there are a variety of natural recorders of climatic information that allow researchers to extend the climate record back many centuries, even many millennia. Known as “proxies” these natural recorders include tree rings, cores taken from corals and ice caps, sediments from lakes and oceans, pollen from plants, vegetation fossilized in packrat dung heaps and many others. All of these provide climate clues about Earth’s changing environment.

NOAA, with its focus on monitoring the oceans, atmosphere and changes in climate over varying time scales, developed the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program in 1990. Located on the Department of Commerce’s Boulder, Colorado campus, the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program was part of the NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service’s National Geophysical Data Center until the end of June, 2002, when it was realigned to become part of the NESDIS National Climatic Data Center.

Image representing satellites, instrumental records, and proxy sources - all of which are used to study paleoclimatology. Now administered under the NCDC Scientific Services Division, the Paleoclimatology Branch continues to serve as the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, and to support several international efforts to study past, present and future climate change, such as the World Climate Research Programme’s project on Climate Variability, the Earth System History Program at the National Science Foundation and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme’s project on Past Global Changes.

At the heart of the Paleoclimatology Branch’s Web site is a robust database providing access to peer-reviewed data from the international community studying past climate change. Users can freely download data from a wide variety of paleo proxy sources, as well as reconstructions of a variety of climatic parameters such as drought, hydroclimate, and air and ocean temperatures from published research. Nearly 1,000 researchers, around half from outside the United States, subscribe to a discussion list managed by the paleoclimatology branch. The Web site also provides a “professional exchange” to help researchers around the world contact each other.

Research, long a focus of the program, continues primarily through the efforts of Connie Woodhouse, who focuses on dendrochronology (the study of tree rings), David M. Anderson, who focuses on using marine records to observe changes associated with El Niño and the Indian monsoon, and Mark Eakin, who focuses on coral reef research.

Photos of scientists with ice cores. In addition to data archives and other resources for paleoclimatology research, the Web site includes a wealth of background materials for varied audiences, such as teachers and students or those in the general public who seek to learn more about the long climate record and what it tells us about the climate of the present and future. The Education and Outreach portion of the Web site provides a general overview of paleoclimatology, and links to two “Paleo Perspectives,” one on North American Drought and one on Global Warming, both popular among educators looking for good background materials on these complex topics.

The Web site also includes a series of online slidesets that serves as ideal background information for undergraduate students studying climate change. Topics include: The Ice Ages, Climate and the Classic Maya Civilization, Coral Paleoclimatology, Polar Ice Cores, Low Latitude Ice Cores, Packrat Middens, Tree Rings, and Heinrich Events.

A recent addition to the Web site, the Climate TimeLine Information Tool, provides a look at weather and climate change from daily and yearly cycles, to ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand and one hundred thousand year time scales. Selected by the National Science Teachers Association’s SciLinks program for excellence in science education and a finalist in the 2002 Pirelli INTERNETional Award for environmental education, the Climate Timeline Information Tool provides links to numerous databases with climate and related environmental information.

photograph of diver collecting coral samples for paleoclimate research. The paleoclimatology branch itself has branches in many parts of the world in the form of “mirror sites” that are connected with international colleagues. These mirrors are hosted by partners at universities and government institutions in Mendoza, Argentina; Lanzhou, China; Toulouse, France; Pune, India; Nairobi, Kenya and Witwatersrand, South Africa. Currently, colleagues at the Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CRICYT) in Mendoza, Argentina, are assisting in translating key elements of the Web site into Spanish.

The paleoclimatology branch of NCDC has a relatively small staff. In addition to the science team of Eakin (chief of the branch), Anderson and Woodhouse, there is a software team made up of Ed Gille and Wendy Gross, a data management team of Bruce Bauer and John Keltner, a science communications specialist, Mark McCaffrey, and administrative support staff, Kimberly S. Shudlow. The entire team is focused on supporting the many scientists in the paleoclimatic research community that contribute their data and work with NOAA to improve data quality and accessibility, and in making this research widely available to interested users.

In the coming years, the Paleoclimatology Branch will continue to support the international research community, develop ways to support a “paleo perspective” on environmental literacy, and look for ways to more fully integrate the paleoenvironmental proxies with the modern instrumental record so that people around the world can gain a better understanding of climate changes and their human dimensions.

Image comparing ice coverage in the Northern Hemisphere 18,000 years ago vs. modern day.