Climate of the Past www.clim-past.net 1814-9324 1814-9332 5 4 2009 10.5194/cp-5-571-2009 http://www.clim-past.net/5/571/2009/ http://www.clim-past.net/5/571/2009/cp-5-571-2009.html http://www.clim-past.net/5/571/2009/cp-5-571-2009.pdf 571 583 2009-10-08 A few prospective ideas on climate reconstruction: from a statistical single proxy approach towards a multi-proxy and dynamical approach J. Guiot guiot@cerege.fr H. B. Wu V. Garreta C. Hatté M. Magny CEREGE, CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université UMR 6635, BP 80, 13545 Aix-en-Provence cedex, France ECCOREV, CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université FR 3098, BP 80, 13545 Aix-en-Provence cedex, France Institut des Sciences de l'Environnement, UQAM, Montréal PQ, H3C 3P8, Canada LSCE, CNRS/CEA UMR 1572, Domaine du CNRS, 91198 Gif-sur-Yvette, France CNRS, UMR 6249, Laboratoire Chrono-Environnemment, UFR des Sciences et Techniques, 16 Route de Gray, 25030 Besançon, France Important progresses have been made in palaeoclimatological studies by using statistical methods. But they are in somewhere limited as they take the present as an absolute reference. This is particularly true for the modern analogue technique. The availability of mechanistic models to simulate the proxies measured in the sediment cores gives now the possibility to relax this constraint. In particular, vegetation models provide outputs comparable to pollen data (assuming that there is a relationship between plant productivity and pollen counts). The input of such models is, among others, climate. The idea behind paleoclimatological reconstructions is then to obtain inputs, given outputs. This procedure, called model inversion, can be achieved with appropriate algorithms in the frame of the Bayesian statistical theory. But we have chosen to present it in an intuitive way, avoiding the mathematics behind it. Starting from a relative simple application, based on an equilibrium BIOME3 model with a single proxy (pollen), the approach has evolved into two directions: (1) by using several proxies measured on the same core (e.g. lake-level status and δ¹³C) when they are related to a component of the vegetation, and (2) by using a more complex vegetation model, the dynamic vegetation model LPJ-GUESS. Examples presented (most of them being already published) concern Last Glacial Maximum in Europe and Africa, Holocene in a site of the Swiss Jura, an Eemian site in France. The main results are that: (1) pollen alone is not able to provide exhaustive information on precipitation, (2) assuming past CO₂ equivalent to modern one may induce biases in climate reconstruction, (3) vegetation models seem to be too much constrained by temperature relative to precipitation in temperate regions. This paper attempts to organise some recent ideas in the palaeoclimatological reconstruction domain and to propose prospectives in that effervescent domain. Atkinson, T C., Briffa, K R., and Coope, G R.: Seasonal temperatures in Britain during the past 22,000 years, reconstructed using beetle remains, Nature, 325(6105), 587–592, 1987. Bartlein, P J. and Prentice, I C.: Climatic response surfaces from pollen data for some eastern North American taxa, J. Biogeogr., 13, 35–57, 1986. 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