LOTRED-South America

scientific goals, data requirements

The scientific goals are

(i) to collate, maintain and share a common state-of-the-art protected data base (for contributors only) with the available multi-proxy data sets, and 

(ii) to produce, as a collective of authors, a series of research results and papers that exceed the capacity of us as individuals. Results may include a gridded data set for temperature and precipitation reconstructions, the diagnosis of solar and volcanic forcing, and the analysis of extreme events, among others.

(iii) compare the multi-proxy reconstruction with results from GCM runs for the last 1000 - 2000 years or selected windows of interest.

A set of expected results (“What can be done with the database?”) is given with the example from the European database. This is indeed a visionary goal and will depend on the data available.

What kind of proxy data are welcome?

All types of documentary data, early instrumental records and well dated, annual or decadal-resolution natural proxies such as tree rings, corals, lake sediments, ice cores and glaciers etc that are related to (or thought to be related to) any climate parameter or weather phenomena are welcome.

Data quality requirements

- The proxy data series should have a minimum length of 100 to 150 years
- Updated data series are ideal
- Long continuous series are most valuable. However, also records over a few years or discrete observations are highly valuable (mostly for verification purposes)
- Series with many data points (high resolution: annual, decadal) are most valuable
- Please provide RAW DATA (not filtered, not smoothed, not treated)
- time series should have NO missing values within the 20th century (calibration period)
- proxies which do not have data in the 20th century calibration period: Are there any possibilities to infer the climatic signal based on historical instrumental time series or other proxies?

Even though the focus is on southern South America, data series from entire South America and surrounding areas are welcome.