Borehole temperatures provide a history of the surface temperature variability and are thus extremely useful for paleoclimate reconstructions. A database of borehole temperatures was produced by researchers at the University of Michigan and has been available for the research community for about 15 years. It is in need of updating and expanding, which is the principal aim of this project. The Principal Investigator of this project is one of the original authors of the database. The five goals of the project are: 1) to renovate and maintain the database with the latest online database technology; 2) to continue data acquisition for better geographical coverage; 3) to refine the climate reconstruction techniques to improve surface temperature reconstructions of the past several millennia or more; 4) to assess the uncertainties of the borehole reconstructions and how they compare to traditional proxy-based reconstructions; and 5) to compare the borehole reconstructions with Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) model simulations to evaluate the energy fluxes across the ground surface and the change in heat content of the near surface solid earth since the last glacial maximum.
The broader impacts include some undergraduate student training and mentoring, but principally the development of an accessible database of borehole temperatures in collaboration with the National Climate Data Center, Paleoclimatology Branch.
