We often hear that a particular season has been the warmest or wettest on record. These temperature and precipitation records are for the instrumental period of record that extends back little more than 150 years, a relatively short time interval in Earth's history.
Earth scientists from various fields have extended our view of Earth's past climates farther back into the past through a variety of proxy indicators. One place where information about paleoclimatology, or the study of past climates, can be found is at the website maintained by NOAA Paleoclimatology, a branch of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Data sets produced by paleoclimatologists from proxy records are archived in the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology. Interested parties may obtain these data sets, which are catalogued variously by investigator, data type or locale.
Spend some time looking at variety of topics available. For example, go to Paleo Perspectives and select one of the four topics: Abrupt Climate Change, North American Drought, On Global Warming and On Colorado River Stream Flow. By this point in the course, you be familiar with some of these topics. Read the story associated with a topic, such as North American Drought, to see the story that describes drought and how drought has affected society during the 20th century, or the instrumental period of record. Recall from the Supplemental in week 5, that we could describe the severity of a drought in terms of the Palmer Drought Severity Index. NCDC has extended the Palmer Drought Index across the country back to 1895, the beginning of what is considered a sufficiently dense climate-reporting network across the nation. Then continue, by reading how paleoclimatologists have assembled a variety of proxy records, such as tree rings and pollen, to extend the record of drought in various locations across North America backward over the last 2000 years. Data sets are available to those interested in working with these data.
You may also wish to go to the Education and Outreach page where you can view a variety of paleoclimatology slide sets prepared by experts in paleoclimatology, such as Climate and the Classic Maya Civilization or Coral Paleoclimatology.
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Prepared by Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@meteor.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2012, The American Meteorological Society.