European summer droughts

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Published: Wednesday, 31 July 2019 15:23

Researchers from the PAGES 2k Network Euro-Med2k subgroup have published a paper on the association between summer temperature and drought across Europe over both short and long timescales.

Placing recent drought in a 12-century-long perspective, authors identified that throughout history northern Europe tends to get wetter and southern Europe tends to get drier during warmer periods. They also observe that recent changes in drought patterns are not yet unprecedented.

Project leader Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist said these new findings are important as we are able to see for the first time that the relationship between summer temperature and drought seen in modern instrumental measurements has persisted for at least 12 centuries. "We can also see that the 20th century wetter trend in the north and drier trend in the south is not unprecedented over this time perspective," he said.

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International media attention

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Published: Monday, 29 July 2019 16:36

The two PAGES 2k Network papers published last week in Nature and Nature Geoscience have attracted huge international media interest.

If you couldn't access the actual articles before, they're now publicly available using SharedIt. Click the links above to find the full-text, view-only versions.

Scientists from around the world, many not even involved in the studies, have welcomed the papers' findings.

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INQUA Award winners

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Published: Monday, 29 July 2019 16:05

Congratulations to (l-r) Qiuzhen Yin (2019 Sir Nicholas Shackleton Medal For Outstanding Young Quaternary Scientist), PAGES Executive Director Marie-France Loutre (2019 INQUA Distinguished Service Medal) and Amaelle Landais (2017 Shackleton Medal) on their awards presented at the 20th INQUA Congress in Dublin, Ireland.

Read more about Dr Loutre's award here.

Unprecedented warming

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Published: Wednesday, 24 July 2019 19:19

Two new PAGES 2k Network papers, published today in Nature and Nature Geoscience, examine temperature trends over the past two millennia and show that recent warming events are unmatched in the past 2,000 years.

The studies, led by Raphael Neukom, find that the rate and spatial consistency of recent warming is extraordinary in the last 2,000 years and cannot be explained by natural factors alone. During the pre-industrial period, volcanic eruptions were the key driver of global temperature fluctuations.

In "No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the pre-industrial Common Era", published in Nature, authors find that previously named climate epochs of the Common Era were not globally coherent phenomena. This is in contrast to the contemporary anthropogenic warming which we do find is globally coherent to an extent that hasn’t happened in the past 2,000 years.

In "Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era", published in Nature Geoscience, authors show the most rapid warming of the past 2,000 years occurred during the second half of the 20th century - highlighting the extraordinary character of current climate change, due mostly to human emissions of heat-trapping gases.

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Read the latest e-news

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Published: Wednesday, 17 July 2019 16:18

Read about the latest PAGES' news, meetings and opportunities from around the world in this month's e-news.

Highlights include details of the new ACME working group, the call for new working groups, submit abstracts by 31 July to four PAGES sessions at the AGU in December, many recent products, PAGES working group news and meeting announcements, ECN updates, and other relevant information.

Historical climatology paper

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Published: Thursday, 11 July 2019 16:18

Members of the PAGES 2k Network PALEOLINK project published a new paper yesterday in Climate of the Past which investigates the research potential of historical climatology.

"The weather behind words – new methodologies for integrated hydrometeorological reconstruction through documentary sources" by Salvador Gil-Guirado, Juan José Gómez-Navarro, and Juan Pedro Montávez, presents a new methodology (COST) that allows the performance of climate reconstructions with monthly resolution.

The variability of the climatic series obtained are coherent with previous studies. The new proposed method is objective and is not affected by social changes, which allows the study of regions with different languages and cultures.

Access the paper here.

Find out more about the PALEOLINK project, and sign up to its mailing list, here.