Last nine-thousand years of temperature variability in Northern Europe

The threat of future global warming has generated a major interest in quantifying past climate variability on centennial and millennial time-scales. However, palaeoclimatological records are often noisy and arguments about past variability are only possible if they are based on reproducible features...

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Published in:Climate of the Past
Main Authors: Seppä, H., Bjune, A. E., Telford, R. J., Birks, H. J. B., Veski, S.
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2018
Subjects:
geo
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-5-523-2009
https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/5/523/2009/
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spelling fttriple:oai:gotriple.eu:10670/1.hnscpl 2023-05-15T17:35:20+02:00 Last nine-thousand years of temperature variability in Northern Europe Seppä, H. Bjune, A. E. Telford, R. J. Birks, H. J. B. Veski, S. 2018-09-27 https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-5-523-2009 https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/5/523/2009/ en eng doi:10.5194/cp-5-523-2009 10670/1.hnscpl https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/5/523/2009/ undefined Geographica Helvetica - geography eISSN: 1814-9332 geo anthro-bio Text https://vocabularies.coar-repositories.org/resource_types/c_18cf/ 2018 fttriple https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-5-523-2009 2023-01-22T17:41:11Z The threat of future global warming has generated a major interest in quantifying past climate variability on centennial and millennial time-scales. However, palaeoclimatological records are often noisy and arguments about past variability are only possible if they are based on reproducible features in several reliably dated datasets. Here we focus on the last 9000 years, explore the results of 36 Holocene pollen-based July mean and annual mean temperature reconstructions from Northern Europe by stacking them to create summary curves, and compare them with a high-resolution, summary chironomid-based temperature record and other independent palaeoclimate records. The stacked records show that the "Holocene Thermal Maximum" in the region dates to 8000 to 4800 cal yr BP and that the "8.2 event" and the "Little Ice Age" at 500–100 cal yr BP are the clearest cold episodes during the Holocene. In addition, a more detailed analysis of the last 5000 years pinpoints centennial-scale climate variability with cold anomalies at 3800–3000 and 500–100 cal yr BP, a long, warmer period around 2000 cal yr BP, and a marked warming since the mid 19th century. The colder (warmer) anomalies are associated with increased (decreased) humidity over the northern European mainland, consistent with the modern high correlation between cold (warm) and humid (dry) modes of summer weather in the region. A comparison with the key proxy records reflecting the main forcing factors does not support the hypothesis that solar variability is the cause of the late-Holocene centennial-scale temperature changes. We suggest that the reconstructed anomalies are typical of Northern Europe and their occurrence may be related to the oceanic and atmospheric circulation variability in the North Atlantic – North-European region. Text North Atlantic Unknown Climate of the Past 5 3 523 535
institution Open Polar
collection Unknown
op_collection_id fttriple
language English
topic geo
anthro-bio
spellingShingle geo
anthro-bio
Seppä, H.
Bjune, A. E.
Telford, R. J.
Birks, H. J. B.
Veski, S.
Last nine-thousand years of temperature variability in Northern Europe
topic_facet geo
anthro-bio
description The threat of future global warming has generated a major interest in quantifying past climate variability on centennial and millennial time-scales. However, palaeoclimatological records are often noisy and arguments about past variability are only possible if they are based on reproducible features in several reliably dated datasets. Here we focus on the last 9000 years, explore the results of 36 Holocene pollen-based July mean and annual mean temperature reconstructions from Northern Europe by stacking them to create summary curves, and compare them with a high-resolution, summary chironomid-based temperature record and other independent palaeoclimate records. The stacked records show that the "Holocene Thermal Maximum" in the region dates to 8000 to 4800 cal yr BP and that the "8.2 event" and the "Little Ice Age" at 500–100 cal yr BP are the clearest cold episodes during the Holocene. In addition, a more detailed analysis of the last 5000 years pinpoints centennial-scale climate variability with cold anomalies at 3800–3000 and 500–100 cal yr BP, a long, warmer period around 2000 cal yr BP, and a marked warming since the mid 19th century. The colder (warmer) anomalies are associated with increased (decreased) humidity over the northern European mainland, consistent with the modern high correlation between cold (warm) and humid (dry) modes of summer weather in the region. A comparison with the key proxy records reflecting the main forcing factors does not support the hypothesis that solar variability is the cause of the late-Holocene centennial-scale temperature changes. We suggest that the reconstructed anomalies are typical of Northern Europe and their occurrence may be related to the oceanic and atmospheric circulation variability in the North Atlantic – North-European region.
format Text
author Seppä, H.
Bjune, A. E.
Telford, R. J.
Birks, H. J. B.
Veski, S.
author_facet Seppä, H.
Bjune, A. E.
Telford, R. J.
Birks, H. J. B.
Veski, S.
author_sort Seppä, H.
title Last nine-thousand years of temperature variability in Northern Europe
title_short Last nine-thousand years of temperature variability in Northern Europe
title_full Last nine-thousand years of temperature variability in Northern Europe
title_fullStr Last nine-thousand years of temperature variability in Northern Europe
title_full_unstemmed Last nine-thousand years of temperature variability in Northern Europe
title_sort last nine-thousand years of temperature variability in northern europe
publishDate 2018
url https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-5-523-2009
https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/5/523/2009/
genre North Atlantic
genre_facet North Atlantic
op_source Geographica Helvetica - geography
eISSN: 1814-9332
op_relation doi:10.5194/cp-5-523-2009
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container_title Climate of the Past
container_volume 5
container_issue 3
container_start_page 523
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