PAGES United Kingdom

european funded key projects

UK PAGES scientists are involved in several multinational projects funded by the European Science Foundation and the European Union.


HOLIVAR

Holocene Climate Variability

The ESF-HOLIVAR programme (Holocene Climate Variability) seeks to bring together European scientists interested in climate variability during the Holocene period. The scientists are palaeoclimatologists, climate historians and climate modelers and the over-arching research questions concern how and why climate has varied naturally on different time-scales (annual to centennial) over this period and how an understanding of past variability can improve the predictability of climate models.  The HOLIVAR Final Open Science meeting was held in London in 2006 and the keynote abstracts and webstream can be downloaded from the HOLIVAR2006 conference website. 


MILLENIUM

European climate of the last millennium

The EU-funded Millennium project has been designed with the aim of answering a single question: Does the magnitude and rate of 20th Century climate change exceed the natural variability of European climate over the last millennium? To answer this question the climate of the last 1000 years in Europe will be constructed using a range of novel techniques to extract quantitative palaeoclimate information from documentary and natural archives, including trees, lakes, mires and ice cores. A multi-proxy approach provides seasonal palaeoclimate signals with quantified precision. Advances in dating allow us, for the first time, to place terrestrial and marine proxy records on the same timescale, allowing lead and lag relationships in ocean-atmosphere forcing to be captured. This information will then be used by Millennium climate modellers to improve their models and make better predictions of the likely impact of climate change in the future.  The multidisciplinary consortium of more than 39 European universities and research Institutes is co-ordinated at the universities of Swansea (UK) and Oulu (Finland). 


ACCROTELM

Abrupt Climate Changes Recorded over the European Land Mass

The frequency, magnitude and rate of past climate changes are incompletely known, but diverse proxy-climate sources imply there were abrupt climate changes in the mid-late Holocene that had significant effects on human societies in Europe and elsewhere. Hitherto under-used primary proxy-climate data sources in Europe are mires and lakes. Mires in northern Europe provide excellent multi-proxy data on past climates, having robust replicable records with decadal resolution. Their stratigraphy notably defines episodes of abrupt climate change; further south in Europe, these climate shifts can also be defined by major lake-level changes. This project has generated continuous records of proxy-climate data from mire sites in transects across Europe, to be compared with complementary data on lake-level changes, to focus on episodes of past abrupt climate change.


EURO-LIMPACS

Euro-limpacs is a €20m Integrated Project funded by the EU designed to assess the effects of future global change on Europe's freshwater ecosystems. The project has 36 partners and the research programme is relevant to the EU Water Framework Directive and other European and international directive.


ISONET

“400 years of Annual Reconstruction of European Climate Variability using a High Resolution Network”

ISONET aims to reconstruct 400 years of European climate variability by analysing the tree ring-width and stable isotopic composition of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen in tree cellulose from 24 sites in sites from the UK, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Finland, Latvia, Poland and Morocco.  There are some 14 partners in universities and other institutions throughout Europe.


DECVEG

Dynamic European Climate-VEGetation Impacts and Interactions

Understanding and predicting regional transient terrestrial vegetation responses to climate change are topical research challenges that require development of both models and datasets. Vegetation patterns have altered considerably in response to past climate and land-use changes and feedbacks from these vegetation changes to the climate system through altered albedo, evapotranspiration, CO2 and CH4 concentrations and other processes are proving to be of great significance. Climate and vegetation models are powerful tools for analysing future trends and conditions but these models are usefully developed and validated by comparison with data sets describing past and present conditions as models develop from global to regional scales and from equilibrium to dynamic states, the demands made on data also develop.

Richard Bradshaw (Liverpool) is project leader but the project receives no direct funding from the UK.


SO&P

Simulations, Observations & Palæoclimatic data: climate variability over the last 500 years

SO&P is a research project funded by the European Union and led by Tim Osborn and Keith Briffa at UEA's Climatic Research Unit. The project will simulate the climate of the last 500 years, will develop improved reconstructions of the real climate over this period, and will compare the two to provide an important test of the climate models and an improved estimate of natural climate variability. This work will then be used to better quantify the uncertainty in future climate projections, and to re-assess the detection of unusual climate change in the observations.


ISOMED

Stable Isotope Records from the Mediterranean

ISOMED is an international working group examining Late Quaternary stable isotope records from the circum-Mediterranean region, particularly from lakes. It was originally set up as part of the PAGES PEPIII transect, and aims to synthesize stable isotopic records from lakes throughout the region to gain an understanding of Mediterranean wide climatic and environmental change during the last 130,000 years. ISOMED is coordinated at the University of Plymouth and the University of Nottingham University.


MITRIE
Millennial Temperature Reconstruction Intercomparison and Evaluation