Paleoclimate Reconstruction Challenge: Available for participation

The last millennia Paleoclimate Reconstruction (PR) Challenge is a model-based venue for experimenting with climate reconstruction methods. The overall idea has been described before (Ammann, 2008) and a modified version of the Challenge is now "live" and available for participation. It is designed to engage the scientific paleoclimate community in examining its methods in a common framework for the purpose of evaluating their relative strengths and weaknesses. A key design element of the Challenge is to allow true "apples to apples" comparison of reconstruction methods across identical experimental platforms. The ultimate goal is to improve last two millennia PR methods so that paleoclimate science can offer the best possible information to help understand both natural and anthropogenic climate change. The Challenge is organized around 4 themes. In each theme, a set of long (1,000+ yrs) forced global climate model (GCM) integrations is used to formulate simulated paleoclimate proxy data (pseudo-proxies) and to provide pseudo-instrumental climate data for calibration and examination of reconstruction fidelity. Several different GCM runs provide a range of simulated climate evolutions that present different reconstruction scenarios. In each Theme, the reconstruction method used is at the prerogative of the participants. Theme 1: Reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature with strongly limited proxy data set (implemented)