P2C2: Synthesis of Holocene Proxy Climate Records from Western North America

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This project generally aims to develop a major new synthesis of proxy climate records that includes a full range of proxy types from western North America and the adjacent Pacific Ocean to build a unified database, with the goal of documenting spatial-temporal patterns of Holocene climate change on multi-centennial to millennial time scales.Reconstructing past climate relies on a variety of evidence from a large number of sites to capture the diverse features and spatial heterogeneity of climate change. To systematically investigate the spatial-temporal pattern of past climate changes and to quantitatively characterize the prominent patterns that might be revealed requires a spatially distributed network of relevant paleoclimate time series. This project will link polar and non-polar regions and to develop paleoclimate data sets for testing model outcomes by assembling a major new database of existing paleoclimate records spanning from the Arctic to the tropics. The scale of the region is sufficient to investigate the primary features of ocean-atmospheric circulation along the eastern margin of the North Pacific and to study the latitudinal response of climate to orbital changes, the strongest climate forcing of the Holocene. The proxy data, including the database and a systematic review of other available evidence, will be compared with the available output from modeling experiments through the Synthesizing the Transient Evolution of the Climate System (TraCE) project.Previous syntheses of proxy records have examined broad-scale patterns at specific time slices and have primarily relied on pollen from terrestrial records or have emphasized sea-surface temperatures from continental margins. Determining the extent to which finer-scale patterns might be discerned based on evidence from a wider variety of proxy types, including physical, chemical and biological evidence from both marine and terrestrial archives, requires a major effort to maximize the utility of previous studies. A large portion of relevant published data has not yet been assembled and requires collaboration with individual scientists to generate a comprehensive, expert-informed product. Once properly assembled and quality controlled, a machine-readable database of proxy climate time series can be readily analyzed to quantify the most prominent patterns.The project offers the potential for providing a large data set of paleoclimate information available to the wider community for use in recognizing patterns of climate and addressing gaps in knowledge. The project would also support two early career scientists.