PALEO-PGEM v1.0: a statistical emulator of Pliocene–Pleistocene climate

Philip B. Holden, Neil Robert Edwards, Thiago Fernando Rangel, Elisa B. Pereira, Giang Tran, Richard D. Wilkinson

Geoscientific model development · 10 December 2019

In one sentence. Gaussian process emulators of PLASIM-GENIE ensembles produce a downscaled, high-resolution reconstruction of Pliocene-Pleistocene temperature and precipitation at 1,000-year intervals.

Abstract

Abstract. We describe the development of the “Paleoclimate PLASIM-GENIE emulator” PALEO-PGEM and its application to derive a downscaled high-resolution spatiotemporal description of the climate of the last five million years. The 5-million-year time frame is interesting for a range of paleo-environmental questions, not least because it encompasses the evolution of humans. However, the choice of time-frame was primarily pragmatic; tectonic changes can be neglected to first order, so that it is reasonable to consider climate forcing restricted to the Earth's orbital configuration, ice-sheet state and the concentration of atmosphere CO2. The approach uses the Gaussian process emulation of the singular value decomposition of boundary-condition ensembles of the intermediate complexity atmosphere-ocean GCM PLASIM-GENIE. Spatial fields of bioclimatic variables of surface air temperature (warmest and coolest seasons) and precipitation (wettest and driest seasons) are emulated at 1,000 year intervals, driven by time-series of scalar boundary-condition forcing (CO2, orbit and ice-volume), and assuming the climate is in quasi-equilibrium. Paleoclimate anomalies at climate model resolution are interpolated onto the observed modern climatology to produce a high-resolution spatiotemporal paleoclimate reconstruction of the Pliocene-Pleistocene.

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