Holden, Philip B. , Edwards, Neil R., Rangel, Thiago F., Pereira, Elisa B., Tran, Giang T. and Wilkinson, Richard D. (2019) PALEO-PGEM v1.0: A statistical emulator of Pliocene-Pleistocene climate. Geoscientific Model Development, 12 (12). pp. 5137-5155. DOI 10.5194/gmd-12-5137-2019.

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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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