An Interdisciplinary Research Program in Climatology

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The scientific goals of the project are to evaluate climate change on four time scales: 1) the last 18,000 years; 2) the last 150,000 years; 3) the last 10 million years; and 4) the period 200 to 250 million years ago. The research strategy is to isolate the factors which are causing climate change on these time scales through a series of climate model experiments, then compare the model results to geological data in order to test how well the observed changes in climate have been reproduced. The research will focus on isolating the climatological impact of changes in incoming solar radiation, changes in geography and orography, and changes in ocean circulation. This research is important because it will determine the climatic significance of various geological processes leading to a better understanding of the natural variation in the climate system.