This proposal uses funds, under the auspices of the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, to apply a novel analytical methodology to climate analysis. The research is founded on the premise that the further back one extends the examination of Earth's climate, the data becomes sparse and the temporal resolution coarser. As such, the issues surrounding sparse data and poor temporal resolution is a hindrance to making reasonable assessments of climate because the climatic event of interest often has a temporal resolution that is shorter than the sampling resolution of the measurement. This leads to aliasing of the time series and a general lack of confidence in the fidelity of the model output and analysis to the real world.
The researcher offers a novel approach to these twin problems by applying regional climate models to a well-documented time of greenhouse warming on Earth during the Eocene period, approximately 55 million years ago. Specifically, the researcher will force models with carbon dioxide, methane, land cover, and orbital parameters specific to the Eocene time period and examine model outputs for regional climate impacts.
This research could have broad impact on the wider science community and catalyze new thinking in issues surrounding climate by offering a new perspective on old and knotty scientific problems. It is possible that a new analytical approach could expose more of geologic time and the geologic record to productive use in understanding climate processes and impacts. The proposed activities fit well into the potentially transformative, high risk, and exploratory nature of the SGER program and may yield a significant scientific payoff in terms of a more comprehensive understanding of Earth's climate.
