PAGES - Past Global Changes

PaCTS, PAGES and paleodata

Details: Published: Thursday, 05 September 2019 12:16

The first version of a crowdsourced reporting standard for paleoclimate data has been discussed in a new Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology paper.

PAGES involvement, via our working groups and workshops, in the Paleoclimate Community reporTing Standards (PaCTS) project is highlighted in the "PaCTS 1.0: A Crowdsourced Reporting Standard for Paleoclimate Data" paper, written by Deborah Khider et al.

PaCTS captures which information should be included when reporting paleoclimate data, with the goal of maximizing the reuse value of paleoclimate datasets, particularly for synthesis work and comparison to climate model simulations. Initiated by the LinkedEarth project, the process to elicit a reporting standard involved an international workshop in 2016, various forms of digital community engagement over the next few years, and grassroots working groups.

PaCTS addresses the acute need for standardizing paleoclimate datasets to minimize "data wrangling", which is estimated to consume up to 80% of researcher time in some scientific fields.

The standards help meet the interoperability and reuse criteria and of FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), of which PAGES is an early signatory.

Access the early-access version here.

Propose a new working group

Details: Published: Wednesday, 28 August 2019 12:23

Does your heart pound for paleoscience? Know others who feel the same?

Propose a new PAGES' working group to address a scientific question in an internationally coordinated way. The application deadline is 24 October 2019 at 17:00 UTC.

You must contact a member of the PAGES Scientific Steering Committee to discuss your plans at least two weeks before you submit the proposal. Applications received without SSC member notification will not be looked upon favorably.

Read the latest e-news

Details: Published: Wednesday, 14 August 2019 15:05

Read about the latest PAGES' news, meetings and opportunities from around the world in this month's e-news.

Highlights include media interest in the recent PAGES 2k Network papers, the deadline for new working group submissions, many recent products, PAGES working group news and meeting announcements, ECN updates, the IPCC Working Group I survey, call for input at EGU 2020, the new Risk KAN program, and other relevant information.

European summer droughts

Details: Published: Wednesday, 31 July 2019 15:23

Researchers from the PAGES 2k Network Euro-Med2k subgroup have published a paper on the association between summer temperature and drought across Europe over both short and long timescales.

Placing recent drought in a 12-century-long perspective, authors identified that throughout history northern Europe tends to get wetter and southern Europe tends to get drier during warmer periods. They also observe that recent changes in drought patterns are not yet unprecedented.

Project leader Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist said these new findings are important as we are able to see for the first time that the relationship between summer temperature and drought seen in modern instrumental measurements has persisted for at least 12 centuries. "We can also see that the 20th century wetter trend in the north and drier trend in the south is not unprecedented over this time perspective," he said.

International media attention

Details: Published: Monday, 29 July 2019 16:36

The two PAGES 2k Network papers published last week in Nature and Nature Geoscience have attracted huge international media interest.

If you couldn't access the actual articles before, they're now publicly available using SharedIt. Click the links above to find the full-text, view-only versions.

Scientists from around the world, many not even involved in the studies, have welcomed the papers' findings.

INQUA Award winners

Details: Published: Monday, 29 July 2019 16:05

Congratulations to (l-r) Qiuzhen Yin (2019 Sir Nicholas Shackleton Medal For Outstanding Young Quaternary Scientist), PAGES Executive Director Marie-France Loutre (2019 INQUA Distinguished Service Medal) and Amaelle Landais (2017 Shackleton Medal) on their awards presented at the 20th INQUA Congress in Dublin, Ireland.

Unprecedented warming

Details: Published: Wednesday, 24 July 2019 19:19

WGLogo2kNetwork Two new PAGES 2k Network papers, published today in Nature and Nature Geoscience, examine temperature trends over the past two millennia and show that recent warming events are unmatched in the past 2,000 years.

The studies, led by Raphael Neukom, find that the rate and spatial consistency of recent warming is extraordinary in the last 2,000 years and cannot be explained by natural factors alone. During the pre-industrial period, volcanic eruptions were the key driver of global temperature fluctuations.

In "No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the pre-industrial Common Era", published in Nature, authors find that previously named climate epochs of the Common Era were not globally coherent phenomena. This is in contrast to the contemporary anthropogenic warming which we do find is globally coherent to an extent that hasn’t happened in the past 2,000 years.

In "Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era", published in Nature Geoscience, authors show the most rapid warming of the past 2,000 years occurred during the second half of the 20th century - highlighting the extraordinary character of current climate change, due mostly to human emissions of heat-trapping gases.