Paleoclimate

Paleoclimate data are derived from Earth's natural climate archives, including tree rings, ice cores, corals, speleothems, and ocean sediments. Such records are used to broaden the sampling of climate variability beyond what is possible from the instrumental record. Paleoclimate data are used to place recent changes into a long-term context and to explore the behavior of the climate system under vastly different boundary conditions than the present day.

To find only the datasets with expert-written commentaries, select the "Datasets with guidance" button when using the search box.

Climate datasets

Has expert guidance
A team on a boat coring lakes in the Arctic (credit: Laura Larocca) An overview of paleoclimate information from high-resolution lake sediment records: Strengths, limitations and key databases

  • Years of Record

Accumulated sediments at the bottom of lakes are invaluable archives of past climate and environmental change. These sediments contain a variety of physical, geochemical,…

Main variables and Earth System components

Atmosphere Air Temperature Precipitation Biosphere Pollen Land
X-ray image illustrating the annual density bands in corals. (Image credit: USGS via Allison Lawman)) Coral geochemical records: An overview of their use as climate proxies and of available databases

  • Years of Record

Coral records are one of the main types of high-resolution (annual to sub-annual) paleoclimate proxies, providing timeseries of environmental conditions reaching hundreds…

Main variables and Earth System components

Atmosphere Evaporation Evaporation-Precipitation Precipitation Ocean Salinity SST - sea surface temperature
speleothems in Soreq cave (credit: Nikita Kaushal) Speleothems and the SISAL database: An overview of the use of speleothems as archives of climate proxies

  • Years of Record

Speleothems provide globally distributed, seasonal to multi-annual resolution climate records encoded in multiple proxies including oxygen and carbon stable isotopes, and…

Main variables and Earth System components

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    • Formats

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    • Timestep

    • Annual, Decadal, Irregular

    • Collections

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Drought atlases from tree rings Drought atlases from tree rings

  • Years of Record

  • 0000-01 to 2005-12

Tree-ring drought atlases provide a paleoclimate analog to modern drought indices, most commonly the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI).  Produced on a regular lat-…

Main variables and Earth System components

Land Drought
Cross section of a tree trunk showing alternating light and dark layers of the tree rings. from ucar scied, https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/tree-rings-and-climate credit pixabay Tree-ring width chronologies: An overview of their use as climate proxies and of available databases

  • Years of Record

The width of an annual tree ring is a very simple indicator of the character of that year’s weather, but collectively the global network of tree-ring width measurements…

Main variables and Earth System components

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    • Formats

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    • Timestep

    • Annual

    • Collections

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