Welcome

This project is a coordinated response to the pressing need for new high-quality proxy-climate records from high latitudes. It contributes to the long-term perspective on natural climate variability that is needed to understand historically unprecedented changes now occurring in the Arctic. A primary goal is to place recent climate warming into the context of the last millennium or longer. Lakes contain the most accessible and widely distributed proxy climate records on land that extend back to the interval that preceded the Little Ice Age, when most of the Arctic experienced the coldest temperatures of the last 8000 years. A large network of proxy climate records is needed to capture the spatial variability of climatic change, which is necessary to study synoptic-scale patterns of atmospheric circulation, and their temporal modes of variability.

Our lake records are being compared with the output of climate models at the National Center for Atmospheric Research to explore the role of volcanism, solar irradiance, and inherent modes of climate variability to explain observed patterns in the proxy data.

The project is open to all interested scientists. Contact us for more information.

• Read more about proxy climate indictors from Arctic lakes.

• See the table of contents for the Journal of Paleolimnology Special Issue or link to the proxy datasets for this project at NOAA World Data Center for Paleoclimatology

• Link to the Kaufman et al. (2009) Science article, "Recent warming reverses long-term Arctic cooling" including corrections

• Lean about the climate-modeling component of the project.