Collaborative Research: P2C2--Multiproxy Reconstructions as A Missing-Data Problem: New Techniques and their Application to Regional Climates of the Past Millennium

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The research team, in this collaborative proposal, aims to produce regional decadal-scale climate forecasts from paleo proxy data. Generally, the researchers will improve existing analytical methods and develop new statistical methods for the reconstruction of past climates from heterogeneous geological proxies (tree rings, ice cores, speleothems, corals, sediments), with particular emphasis on regional variability over the past two millennia. Specifically, the research team will use the regularized expectation-maximization algorithm (RegEM) algorithm to exploit linear covariation in space among different climate variables or proxies to impute missing values and estimate climate statistics. The goal is to directly address uncertainties in data, especially surrounding missing data within a series. This is important for paleoclimate data sets since the spatial or temporal series may not be continuous.The broader impacts involve the training of students across disciplinary boundaries in a timely integration of statistics and climatology.