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Analysis and Interpretation: Modeling of Past Climates

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The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History

Abstract

Computer climate models have become an essential tool to analyze past and future climate change. Since these models comprise rather complicated pieces of computer code, the interpretation of their results requires care and a basic familiarity with their structure, underlying assumptions, and the implications of their results. This need becomes even more pressing when comparing paleoclimate simulations with proxy reconstructions, because they capture different spatial and temporal scales of climate variations. This chapter introduces important topics of consideration for the interested community of paleoclimatologists and historical climatologists who may not work regularly with climate models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some modern climate models include a model of the Earth’s carbon cycle. In those models, the external forcing is the anthropogenic carbon emissions, whereas the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are interactively calculated by the model.

  2. 2.

    Schmidt et al., 2011.

  3. 3.

    Bothe et al., 2013. The external forcing prescribed in the CMIP simulations with different models is similar but not the same in all of them, since each modeling group chose different reconstructions of, e.g., solar irradiance or volcanic aerosols.

  4. 4.

    Brönnimann et al., 2013.

References

  • Bothe, O. et al. “Consistency of the Multi-Model CMIP5/PMIP3-past1000 Ensemble.” Climate of the Past 9 (2013): 2471–87.

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  • Brönnimann, Stefan et al. “Transient State Estimation in Paleoclimatology Using Data Assimilation.” PAGES News 21 (2013): 74–75.

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  • Schmidt, G.A. et al. “Climate Forcing Reconstructions for Use in PMIP Simulations of the Last Millennium (v1.0).” Geoscientific Model Development 4 (2011): 33–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Coastal Research, Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Geesthacht, Germany

    Eduardo Zorita & Sebastian Wagner

Authors
  1. Eduardo Zorita
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  2. Sebastian Wagner
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Sam White

  2. Institute of History, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change, Bern, Switzerland

    Christian Pfister

  3. Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Franz Mauelshagen

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© 2018 The Author(s)

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Zorita, E., Wagner, S. (2018). Analysis and Interpretation: Modeling of Past Climates. In: White, S., Pfister, C., Mauelshagen, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_13

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-43019-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43020-5

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

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