RECONSTRUCTING PAST CLIMATES FOR FUTURE PREDICTION: INTEGRATING HIGH-RESOLUTION PALAEO DATA FOR MEANINGFUL PREDICTION IN THE AUSTRALASIAN REGION

Monday 27th & Tuesday 28th June 2005
Australian Academy of Sciences
Canberra ACT Australia

Held under the auspices of the Australian Academy of Science’s National Committees for Earth System Science and Quaternary Research, the GeoQuEST Research Centre, IGBP Past Global Changes, PAGES/CLIVAR Intersection and the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA), and jointly funded by the Australian Greenhouse Office and the Australian Research Council Research Networks ‘Discovering the Past and Present to Shape the Future’ and ‘Earth System Science’

There exists a wealth of indicators of past climate that show rapid changes have taken place. Such indicators could be used to understand the range of past, present and future climate variability. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the Australasian region that straddles several major atmospheric and oceanic boundaries (many of which are interconnected) which have the potential to be highly sensitive under a variety of future climate change scenarios (e.g. El Niño-Southern Oscillation, Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, Australian Monsoon, East Australian Current, the Leeuwin Current and the mid-latitude westerlies).

This 2-day workshop will bring together climatologists (palaeo and contemporary) and modellers working on a variety of different palaeoclimatic and historical datasets spanning the last 60,000 years to discuss their results within the context of past and future change in the region. The workshop will allow the presentation of the latest different palaeoclimatic datasets of relevance to the Australia and New Zealand region (from the ice, marine and terrestrial realms) and place the results in a global context. The workshop will provide an opportunity for the scientific community to discuss ways in which this data can be used more effectively to help us understand climate mechanisms for predicting future climate change and its variability on the millennial, centennial, decadal and annual timescales.

To enhance the utility of the data in modelling applications, discussion will be made of the ways in which future research should be directed to develop methods of integrating and characterising the diverse palaeo indicators on a regional spatial scale. Additionally, it will be necessary to quantify the uncertainties associated with both the palaeo data and any resulting climate reconstructions. Nowhere is this more relevant than for the past millennium where reconstructions for the Northern Hemisphere have generated a robust discussion in the scientific community of methodological approaches to datasets. The workshop will pave the way for new and robust methods for reconstructing past climatic changes in the Australasian region for comparison to other datasets from around the world (including the Northern Hemisphere ‘hockey stick’ curve). The workshop will identify records where the assembly of data will provide higher temporal and spatial resolution than have previously been available (or attempted), and the provision of data in a manner suitable for use in model validation (including the last glacial-interglacial transition which is the focus of the INQUA Australasian INTIMATE Project). Participants who have attempted to calibrate palaeo data against existing instrumental climate records are keenly encouraged to attend.

Confirmed speakers include:
Dr Ed Cook (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)
Dr Mike Gagan (Australian National University)
Dr Kate Harle (CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystem)
Dr Neville Nicholls (Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre)
Dr Bryant McAveney (Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre)
Prof. Henry Pollack (University of Michigan)
A./Prof. J.P. Steffenson (University of Copenhagen)