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Perspectives of Parameter and State Estimation in Paleoclimatology

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Climate Change

Abstract

Past climates provide a means for evaluating the response of the climate system to large perturbations. Our ultimate goal is to constrain climate models rigorously by paleoclimate data. For illustration, we used a conceptual climate model (a classical energy balance model) and applied the so-called “adjoint method” to minimize the misfit between our model and sea-surface temperature data for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, between 19,000 and 23,000 years before present). The “adjoint model” (derivative code) was generated by an “adjoint compiler.” We optimized parameters controlling the thermal diffusion and the sensitivity of the outgoing longwave radiation to changes in the zonal-mean surface temperature and the atmospheric CO2 concentration. As a result, we estimated that an equilibrium climate sensitivity between 2.2 °C and 2.5 °C was consistent with the reconstructed glacial cooling, and we were able to infer structural deficits of the simple model where the fit to current observations and paleo data was not successful.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The code of the one-dimensional energy balance–climate model and its adjoint Ebm1D is available upon request from apaul@marum.de.

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Acknowledgments

AP expresses his sincere gratitude to the organizers of the “Milutin Milankovitch 130th Anniversary Symposium” (Belgrade, 22–25 September 2009), who made this conference a very memorable and inspiring experience. We acknowledge the helpful discussions with Takasumi Kurahashi-Nakamura, as well as the instructive comments by Michel Crucifix and an anonymous reviewer. All graphs were drawn with the Generic Mapping Tools (Wessel and Smith 1998). This research was funded by the DFG-Research Center/Center of Excellence MARUM—“The Ocean in the Earth System.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and Department of Geosciences, University of Bremen, 33 04 40, D-28334, Bremen, Germany

    André Paul

  2. Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany

    Martin Losch

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  1. André Paul
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  2. Martin Losch
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Correspondence to André Paul .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1348, Belgium

    André Berger

  2. University of Belgrade, Belgrade, 11120, Serbia

    Fedor Mesinger

  3. , Department of Physics, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, 11120, Serbia

    Djordje Sijacki

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Paul, A., Losch, M. (2012). Perspectives of Parameter and State Estimation in Paleoclimatology. In: Berger, A., Mesinger, F., Sijacki, D. (eds) Climate Change. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0973-1_7

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