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Holocene Climate Change On August 6-7, 2001, NSF sponsored a workshop to develop a research plan to study the Holocene record of climate variability. The workshop participants, based on the input of the wider scientific community, identified a series of important research questions that, when answered, will provide important clues to the nature of climate variability that occurred on human time scales beyond the observed instrumental record of climate. The main focus of this research is to reconstruct the recent history of coupled atmosphere-ocean-terrestrial interactions and to understand the impact of these interactions on regional and global climate on time scales of decades to centuries and millennia. It will evaluate the extent to which changes in climate are forced by external means (i.e., variations in solar constant, tides or volcanic eruptions) or internal interactions among components of the climate system (i.e., variations in thermohaline circulation, tropical air-sea interactions, ice-ocean-biosphere feedbacks). The Holocene was chosen because the climatic boundary conditions are similar to those experienced now and in the near future. There is growing awareness that variations in Holocene climate on land and over the oceans were larger than previously believed. These changes in climate may have affected humans as recently as several hundred years ago during the Little Ice Age (LIA) or a thousand years ago during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). The goal of this research is to understand the nature, significance and causes of these natural oscillations in climate; how widespread, systematic and abrupt they may have been; and the likelihood of their recurrence in the near future. An important aspect of the research is to document how changes in the behavior of coupled atmosphere-ocean-land systems have affected climate in North America during the Holocene and to forecast the likely future effects of natural climate variability on North American climate. In addition to the traditional single investigator projects that have been typical of paleoclimate and paleoceanographic research during the last decade, this new effort will encourage multi-investigator, multi-institutional collaborations to bring a broader interdisciplinary perspective and approach to the study of Holocene climate. The research effort will provide resources for members of the marine and terrestrial research communities to work together while helping to develop formal collaborations with researchers in the climate dynamics and numerical modeling communities. In order to stimulate and facilitate these interactions, open meetings of investigators and other interested individuals will be organized at annual meetings of scientific organizations to discuss the current status of the funded research projects and important topics and problems related to Holocene climate variability. This will help educate future paleoclimate researchers and foster the kind of interactions that lead to improved research strategies in paleoclimatology and paleoceanography. |
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