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Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia

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Ahmed, Moinuddin Anchukaitis, Kevin J. Asrat, Asfawossen Borgaonkar, Hemant P. Braida, Martina Goosse, Hugues [UCL] Zorita, Eduardo

Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

Document type Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Access type Accès restreint
Publication date 2013
Language Anglais
Journal information "Nature Geoscience" - Vol. 6, no.5, p. 339-346 (2013)
Peer reviewed yes
issn 1752-0894
e-issn 1752-0908
Publication status Publié
Affiliation UCL - SST/ELI/ELIC - Earth & Climate
Keywords CISM: CECI ; 1443
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Bibliographic reference Ahmed, Moinuddin ; Anchukaitis, Kevin J. ; Asrat, Asfawossen ; Borgaonkar, Hemant P. ; Braida, Martina ; et. al. Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia. In: Nature Geoscience, Vol. 6, no.5, p. 339-346 (2013)
Permanent URL http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/129627