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Saturday, May 12, 2012

That Neglected Southern Hemisphere

The NOAA Paleo Website has a huge selection of the various data attempting to reconstruct past climate. The Southern Hemisphere tends to be somewhat neglected. So I have been playing around with a couple of tree ring proxy reconstructions, Neukom, R., et al. 2010. Southern South America Multiproxy 1100 Year Temperature Reconstructions. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology and another, Cook, E.R., D'Arrigo, R.D., and Buckley, B.M., 1998, Tasmania Temperature Reconstruction. International Tree-Ring Data Bank. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center-A for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series #98-040. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA. The Cook et al. reconstruction had data that averaged 15 which I assumed to be degrees C, which gave me an idea to illustrate one of the issue with global averaging of temperature. While there may be a range of temperatures for a region, the range of energy flux associated with those temperatures would be quite different. So I converted the Tasmania reconstruction to degrees K and then to Watts per meter squared that may be associated with that range of temperature. Then I did the same thing with the Southern South America(SSA) reconstruction which was in temperature anomaly. In order to align the mean value for the common period, 900 AD to 1991 AD, I has to adjust the average temperature of the SSA to 288.2 K degrees. Then I averaged the two reconstruction only for there common period. Just to highlight the common points, I added an 11 year moving average. Then I included the Goddard Institute for Space Studies 24S to 44S latitude regional surface temperature average converted to approximate Watts per meter squared. I just eyeballed the fit of the GISS data which as shown, has an average temperature of 288.28K degrees. This post is just to provide proper citation to the authors of the reconstruction and GISS for the temperature data.

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