This award will partially support a workshop to help organize paleoclimate modelers and data generators for participation in the IPCC AR5 deliberations. Specifically, the award will be used to support the travel costs for six early career researchers and graduate students to participate in the workshop as well as provide some support for meals during the meeting.
For the first time, paleoclimate modeling/data research activities are being incorporated into the Coupled Modeling Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) activities. A major goal of the workshop is to ensure that the community of paleoclimate researchers is aware of the best practices to be applied in these modeling/data comparison activities. The outcome of the workshop should be better approaches for using paleoclimate model/data activities to infer climate sensitivities to external forcings and strategies to account for uncertainties in both the model output and paleoclimate proxy reconstructions.
Along with a series of future climate change experiments the coordinated Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) also included paleo-climate model simulations of the Last Glacial Maximum (21,000 years ago), the mid-Holocene (6,000 years ago) and the Last Millennium (1000-2000 CE). This large database, which forms the backbone of the IPCC multimodel analysis of Working Group 1, allows for the first time to identify potential connections between paleo-climate simulations and future projections, using the same model versions. To seize this unique opportunity and explore the possibility to constrain the uncertainty of future climate projections with the help of paleo climate data and paleo-climate models, a climate workshop was organized as part of this NSF grant. The aim of this workshop was to bring together paleo-climate data experts and climate modelers to generate a number of products a 'best practice' review paper written by participants to help guide the broader climate community in this type of novel past-to-future analyses to foster the appreciation from the present-day and future climate research communities for the benefits of paleo-climate data and models to encourage more quantitative approaches in the paleo-climate community that will help establish the links of paleo-climate research and future climate changes, to emphasize the importance of synthesizing paleo climate data and of providing proper uncertainty ranges. The international workshop was held in March 2012 at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, USA. About 80 researchers and students participated in a stimulating multi-disciplinary atmosphere. As part of the workshop, a public evening event was organized at the Bishop Museum. An open podium discussion with about 200 attendees from the general public followed a keynote presentation of one of the workshop participants. The main scientific conclusions of the workshop were published as a peer-reviewed publication (Schmidt et al. 2014, Clim. Past, 10, 221–250). .
