What climate signal is contained in decadal- to centennial-scale isotope variations from Antarctic ice cores?

Münch, Thomas; Laepple, Thomas

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-14-2053-2018

Articles | Volume 14, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-14-2053-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Paleoclimate data synthesis and analysis of associated uncertainty...

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-14-2053-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 14, issue 12

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

20 Dec 2018

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 20 Dec 2018

What climate signal is contained in decadal- to centennial-scale isotope variations from Antarctic ice cores?

Thomas Münch and Thomas Laepple

Data sets

Stable-isotope records from Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica W. Graf, H. Oerter, O. Reinwarth, W. Stichler, F. Wilhelms, H. Miller, and R. Mulvaney, R. https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.728240

Stable water isotopes measured along two snow trenches sampled at Kohnen Station, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica in the 2014/15 field season T. Münch, S. Kipfstuhl, J. Freitag, H. Meyer, H., and T. Laepple https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.876639

West Antarctica Ice Core and Climate Model Data E. J. Steig https://doi.org/10.7265/N5QJ7F8B

ERA-Interim Reanalysis, Monthly Means of Daily Means European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim-full-moda/levtype=sfc/

Model code and software

proxysnr: An R package to separate the common signal from local noise in climate proxy records using spectral analyses T. Münch https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2027639

simproxyage: An R package to simulate age uncertainty in layer-counted climate proxy records T. Münch https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2025833

Short summary

Proxy data on climate variations contain noise from many sources and, for reliable estimates, we need to determine those temporal scales at which the climate signal in the proxy record dominates the noise. We developed a method to derive timescale-dependent estimates of temperature proxy signal-to-noise ratios, which we apply and discuss in the context of Antarctic ice-core records but which in general are applicable to a large set of palaeoclimate records.