A simulated Northern Hemisphere terrestrial climate dataset for the past 60,000 years

• Main Authors: Armstrong, Edward, Hopcroft, Peter, Valdes, P.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) 2019
• Subjects: Atmospheric sciences and Earth Observation Imagery; Greenland; Greenland ice cores
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5285/de6591c3d5d44b08b4d954410f353c6e; https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/de6591c3d5d44b08b4d954410f353c6e

We present a continuous land climate reconstruction dataset extending from 60 kyr before present to the pre-industrial period at 0.5deg resolution on a monthly timestep for 0degN to 90degN. It has been generated from 42 discrete snapshot simulations using the HadCM3B-M2.1 coupled general circulation model. We incorporate Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) and Heinrich events to represent millennial scale variability, based on a temperature reconstruction from Greenland ice-cores, with a spatial fingerprint based on a freshwater hosing simulation with HadCM3B-M2.1. Interannual variability is also added and derived from the initial snapshot simulations. Model output has been downscaled to 0.5deg resolution (using simple bilinear interpolation) and bias corrected using either the University of East Anglia, Climate Research Unit observational data (for temperature, precipitation, windchill, and minimum monthly temperature), or the EWEMBI dataset (for incoming shortwave energy). Here we provide datasets for; surface air temperature, precipitation, incoming shortwave energy, wind-chill, snow depth (as snow water equivalent), number of rainy days per month, minimum monthly temperature, and the land-sea mask and ice fractions used in the simulations. The datasets are in the form of NetCDF files. The variables are represented by a set of 24 files that have been compressed into nine folders: temp, precip, down_sw, wind_chill, snow, rainy_days, tempmonmin, landmask and icefrac. Each file represents 2500 years. The landmask and ice fraction are provided annually, whereas the climate variables are given as monthly files equivalent to 30000 months, between the latitudes 0deg to 90degN at 0.5deg resolution. Each of the climate files therefore have the dimensions 180 (lat) x 720 (lon) x 30000 (month). We also provide an example subset of the temperature dataset, which gives decadal averages for each month for 0-2500 years.