Broader view of North American climate over the past two millennia: Synthesizing paleoclimate records from diverse archives Active

Regional- to continental-scale paleoclimate syntheses of temperature and hydroclimate in North America are essential for understanding long-term spatiotemporal variability in climate, and for properly assessing risk on decadal and longer timescales. However, existing syntheses rely almost exclusively on tree-ring records, which are known to underestimate low-frequency variability and rarely extend beyond the last millennium. Meanwhile, many additional records from a variety of archives are available and hold the potential of broadening and enhancing our understanding of past climate in North America over the past two thousand years. We propose to bring together a diverse group of with expertise that spans the relevant natural archives for North America to, for the first time, pull together these disparate paleoclimate records into a unified database with a common format. This will enable us to take advantage of emerging multiproxy and time-uncertain reconstruction techniques to produce multiple-archive climate reconstructions for North America over the past two millennia.

Principal Investigator(s):

Nicholas McKay (Northern Arizona University)

Darrell Kaufman (Northern Arizona University)

Debra A Willard (USGS - Global Change Research and Development)

Gregory T Pederson (USGS - Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center)





Publications:

Martin, Justin T., Gregory T. Pederson, Connie A. Woodhouse, Edward R. Cook, Gregory J. McCabe, Kevin J. Anchukaitis, Erika K. Wise, et al. “Increased Drought Severity Tracks Warming in the United States’ Largest River Basin.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 6, 2020, 201916208. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1916208117.

McKay, N. (2014). A novel multiproxy approach: the PAGES North America 2k working group.  PAGES magazine 22: 100.

PAGES2k Consortium, (2017) “A Global Multiproxy Database for Temperature Reconstructions of the Common Era” SCIENTIFIC DATA, 4: 170088.

Shuman, Bryan N., Cody Routson, Nicholas McKay, Sherilyn Fritz, Darrell Kaufman, Matthew E. Kirby, Connor Nolan, Gregory T. Pederson, and Jeannine-Marie St-Jacques. “Placing the Common Era in a Holocene Context: Millennial to Centennial Patterns and Trends in the Hydroclimate of North America over the Past 2000 Years.” Climate of the Past 14, no. 5 (May 28, 2018): 665–86. https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-14-665-2018.

 

Anchukaitis, K.A., Coulthard, B., McKay, N., Pearl, J., Pederson, G.T., Routson, C., St. George, S., and Wilson, R. (2018), Large-scale temperature reconstructions from tree rings in North America: challenges and opportunities. Presented at 2018 MtnClim: Anticipating climate change impact in mountains, 17-21 Sep 2018, Gothic, CO.  

Martin, J.T., Pederson, G.T., Woodhouse, C.A., Cook, E.R., McCabe, G.M., Anchukaitis, K.J.,  and Wise, E.K. (2018), Increased drought intensity driven by warming in the United States’ largest river basin. Presented at 2018 MtnClim: Anticipating climate change impact in mountains, 17-21 Sep 2018, Gothic, CO.  

McKay, N.P. (2018), The linked paleo data framework (LiPD) - introduction and open dis- cussion, 1st PAGES Webinar - Wednesday 17 October 2018, [Invited Talk]. Youtube here. 

McKay, N.P., and the PAGES 2k Consortium (2017), Spatial covariability of temperature and hydroclimate as a function of timescale during the Common Era, AGU Fall Meeting 2017, New Orleans, Louisiana, [Talk] 

McKay, N.P. (2017), Linked PaleoData: What is it and what can it do for you?, PAGES 5th Open Science Meeting, Zaragoza, Spain, [Talk] 

McKay, N.P. (2016a), On the PAGES2k project, paleoclimate cyberinfrastructure and in- tegrating paleoclimatology and paleoseismology, Southern California Earthquake Center, SoSAFE Workshop, Palm Springs, CA, [Invited Talk] 

McKay, N.P. (2016b), A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the common era, American Quaternary Association, 24th Biennial Meeting, Santa Fe, NM, [Invited Talk] 

McKay, N.P., J. Emile-Geay, and the PAGES2k Consortium (2015b), A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era, AGU Fall Meeting 2015, San Francisco, California, [Invited Talk] 

McKay, N.P. (2015a), Collaborative database building and lessons learned from the pages 2k projects, Open kickoff meeting of the PAGES working group Global Soil and Sediment Transfers in the Anthropocene, Hamburg, Germany, [Invited talk] 

McKay, N.P. (2014c), PAGES-Powell North America 2k database, AGU Fall Meeting 2014, San Francisco, California, [Poster] 

Pederson, G.T., Anchukaitis, K., St. George, S., McKay, N., Routson, C., and the PAGES NAM2K Group (2016), North American 0.5 degree gridded summer temperature reconstructions. 2016 Mountain Climate Conference (MtnClim), 17-21 Oct 2016, Leavenworth, WA. 

Pederson, G.T. Anchukaitis, K., St. George, S., McKay, N., Routson, C., and the PAGES NAM2K Group (2016), Progress towards North American 0.5 degree gridded summer temperature reconstructions. NOROCK Ecoluch Seminar, 25 Oct 2016, Bozeman, MT.