News from the Environment Institute

Seminar: Past climate variability in south-eastern Australia: progress and potential from sediment archives

“Records of past climate which span decades through millennia are crucial for establishing baseline climate variability to place modern and future change in context. Such records provide new insights into the drivers of long term regional climate change and help constrain the probability of climate extremes. Our understanding of long term climate variability stems from a range of natural archives, including tree rings, cave stalagmites and lake sediments. Each of those natural archives carries inherent idiosyncrasies and uncertainties which limit the direct interpretation of climate parameters such as temperature and rainfall. Furthermore, despite decades of research, high quality archives of Australian past climate variability are scarce, with a pressing need for new records with improved dating and temporal resolution. Here I will discuss recent attempts to address these challenges through a series of case studies, including new records from lake and wetland sediments, regional syntheses of past climate data, novel approaches to the numerical analysis of such data and contemporary process studies aimed at modelling and calibrating past climate proxies.”

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