Climate of the Past
www.clim-past.net
1814-9324
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3
2
2007
10.5194/cp-3-331-2007
http://www.clim-past.net/3/331/2007/
http://www.clim-past.net/3/331/2007/cp-3-331-2007.html
http://www.clim-past.net/3/331/2007/cp-3-331-2007.pdf
331
339
2007-06-18
How cold was Europe at the Last Glacial Maximum? A synthesis of the progress achieved since the first PMIP model-data comparison
G. Ramstein
M. Kageyama
masa.kageyama@lsce.ipsl.fr
J. Guiot
H. Wu
C. Hély
G. Krinner
S. Brewer
Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, UMR CEA-CNRS-UVSQ 1572, CE Saclay, L'Orme des Merisiers, Bât. 701, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France
CEREGE, BP 80 Europole Méditerranéen de l'Arbois, 13545 Aix-en-Provence cedex 4, France
SKLLQ, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710075, China
Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l'Environnement, 54, rue Molière, 38402 Saint Martin d'Hères cedex, France
The Last Glacial Maximum has been one of the first foci of the Paleoclimate
Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP). During its first phase, the
results of 17 atmosphere general circulation models were compared to
paleoclimate reconstructions. One of the largest discrepancies in the
simulations was the systematic underestimation, by at least 10°C, of the
winter cooling over Europe and the Mediterranean region observed in the
pollen-based reconstructions. In this paper, we investigate the progress
achieved to reduce this inconsistency through a large modelling effort and
improved temperature reconstructions. We show that increased model spatial
resolution does not significantly increase the simulated LGM winter cooling.
Further, neither the inclusion of a vegetation cover compatible with the LGM
climate, nor the interactions with the oceans simulated by the
atmosphere-ocean general circulation models run in the second phase of PMIP
result in a better agreement between models and data. Accounting for changes
in interannual variability in the interpretation of the pollen data does not
result in a reduction of the reconstructed cooling. The largest recent
improvement in the model-data comparison has instead arisen from a new
climate reconstruction based on inverse vegetation modelling, which
explicitly accounts for the CO<sub>2</sub> decrease at LGM and which substantially
reduces the LGM winter cooling reconstructed from pollen assemblages. As a
result, the simulated and observed LGM winter cooling over Western Europe
and the Mediterranean area are now in much better agreement.
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