SGER: Regional Climate Modeling of Western North America in the Early Eocene: Applying a New Cutting-edge Model to a Long-standing and Significant Paleoclimate Problem

该提案利用探索性研究小额赠款(SGER)计划资助的资金，将一种新的分析方法应用于气候分析。这项研究的前提是，越往后扩展地球气候的检查，数据就变得稀疏，时间分辨率就越粗糙。因此，数据稀少和时间分辨率差的问题阻碍了对气候进行合理评估，因为感兴趣的气候事件的时间分辨率往往短于测量的采样分辨率。这导致了时间序列的混叠，以及对模型输出和分析与现实世界的保真度普遍缺乏信心。这位研究人员通过将区域气候模型应用于地球始新世时期(约5500万年前)有充分记录的温室气体变暖时间，提供了一种解决这两个问题的新方法。具体地说，研究人员将强制使用始新世时期特定的二氧化碳、甲烷、土地覆盖和轨道参数的模型，并检查区域气候影响的模型输出。这项研究可能会对更广泛的科学界产生广泛影响，并通过为古老而棘手的科学问题提供新的视角，催化围绕气候问题的新思维。一种新的分析方法有可能使更多的地质时间和地质记录在理解气候过程和影响方面发挥更大的作用。拟议的活动非常符合SGER计划潜在的变革性、高风险和探索性，并可能在更全面地了解地球气候方面产生重大的科学回报。

This proposal uses funds, under the auspices of the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, to apply a novel analytical methodology to climate analysis. The research is founded on the premise that the further back one extends the examination of Earth's climate, the data becomes sparse and the temporal resolution coarser. As such, the issues surrounding sparse data and poor temporal resolution is a hindrance to making reasonable assessments of climate because the climatic event of interest often has a temporal resolution that is shorter than the sampling resolution of the measurement. This leads to aliasing of the time series and a general lack of confidence in the fidelity of the model output and analysis to the real world. The researcher offers a novel approach to these twin problems by applying regional climate models to a well-documented time of greenhouse warming on Earth during the Eocene period, approximately 55 million years ago. Specifically, the researcher will force models with carbon dioxide, methane, land cover, and orbital parameters specific to the Eocene time period and examine model outputs for regional climate impacts. This research could have broad impact on the wider science community and catalyze new thinking in issues surrounding climate by offering a new perspective on old and knotty scientific problems. It is possible that a new analytical approach could expose more of geologic time and the geologic record to productive use in understanding climate processes and impacts. The proposed activities fit well into the potentially transformative, high risk, and exploratory nature of the SGER program and may yield a significant scientific payoff in terms of a more comprehensive understanding of Earth's climate.