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）项目资助的资金，将一种新的分析方法应用于气候分析。这项研究的前提是，对地球气候的研究越深入，数据就越稀疏，时间分辨率也越粗糙。因此，围绕数据稀疏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通常具有比测量的采样分辨率短的时间分辨率。这导致了时间序列的混叠，以及对模型输出和分析对现实世界的保真度普遍缺乏信心。研究人员通过将区域气候模型应用于大约5500万年前始新世时期地球上有充分记录的温室变暖时期，为解决这两个问题提供了一种新的方法。具体来说，研究人员将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来建立模型，并检查模型输出的区域气候影响。这项研究可以对更广泛的科学界产生广泛的影响，并通过对古老而棘手的科学问题提供新的视角，促进对气候问题的新思考。一种新的分析方法可能会使更多的地质时间和地质记录在了解气候过程和影响方面得到有效利用。拟议的活动很好地适应了SGER项目潜在的变革性、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.