Motivation:  

Paleoclimatology is ultimately the study of processes which control geological as well as historical, present-day, and future climate change.  To give just a few examples: What are the circulation and moisture-mediated feedbacks which drive the transition between glacial and interglacial climates, and just how quickly can large-scale deglaciation occur in response?  What drove the change in Pacific Basin state (sea surface temperature, winds, sea level pressure, thermocline depth) in the late 1970s, and have similar events occurred previously?  The answers to  these questions may illustrate processes which operate on human timescales, and they can have an important role in the debate over climate change mitigation (McCarthy et al., 2001; Alley et al., 2002).

Major advances in paleoclimatology in response to such "Grand Challenges" have relied on a variety of complementary strategies and techniques.  For example, Fairbanks et al. (1989,1990) used pairs of radiocarbon and Thorium/Uranium-derived dates for surface-growing corals to not only derive a deglacial eustatic sea level curve and estimate the timing of glacial meltwater pulses, but also to extend the radiocarbon calibration to the Last Glacial Maximum.   The application of semi-redundant gas and water stable isotope, noble gas, trace greenhouse gas, particulate concentration, conductivity, and borehole temperature inversion techniques were crucial to the dating, timing and interpretation of important events in the Greenland ice core records developed in the 1990s, in particular the abrupt nature of Arctic climate change during the last deglaciation (Blunier et al., 1999; Severinghaus et al., 1999).  Similarly, multiple proxies for surface and deep-sea temperature developed for application in marine sediment cores have contributed important insights into the debate over tropical sea surface temperature change since the Last Glacial Maximum (Mix et al., 1999).  The product of that study was used to force a model of the general circulation of the atmosphere to predict the response of inter-ocean moisture transport (Hostetler et al., 1999).   Use of a wide variety of seasonal-to-annual resolution proxy observations from a global network, in conjunction with robust multivariate statistical techniques, has contributed directly to the controversy over whether human influence on the mean global climate has unambigously appeared in the historical surface temperature record (Mann et al., 1998).  

Use of multiple, complementary tools in paleoclimatology will only increase as the complexity and sublety of the questions we ask increases.  But:

• How are these various tools and techniques best applied?
• What are their strengths and weaknesses?
  
• What are the most promising future applications?
  

There are about three dozen faculty and research scientists in ten departments at the University of Arizona who work in paleoenvironmental research and in related fields.  This diversity of talent, interests, skills and tools presents a unique resource for students wishing to develop and/or apply multidisciplinary tools to the resolution of important and challenging questions in paleo research.   By surveying a broad range of tools used to solve paleo questions, we will focus less on a particular or familiar tool or two, and more on the big questions.  I am also hoping our UA paleoclimate research community will use this seminar to find new ideas for potential collaborations, and find the students to turn those ideas into reality.  This course is brand new, and is supported in spirit by an NSF Major Research Instrumentation grant to J.W. Beck, J.E. Cole,  M.N. Evans, M.K. Hughes, and J.T. Overpeck, an NSF CAREER grant to M.N. Evans, and the UA Institute for the Study of Planet Earth (ISPE).

Goals:  

By the conclusion of this seminar series, students should be able to:

1. Identify important gaps in the existing state-of-the-art in a wide variety of fields within the global paleoclimate research effort;
   
2. Assess the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of a set of paleoclimate-relevant research tools available at the University of Arizona;
   
3. Explicitly develop, and possibly initiate, a multidisciplinary research effort designed to resolve an outstanding paleoclimate question.

• An introduction to state-of-the-art problems and techniques in paleoclimatology.
• An overview of the variety of locally-available tools and techniques available to them, an introduction to key scientific personnel with expertise in these techniques, and ideas for dissertation topics.
• Practice in thinking "multidisciplinarily" about strategies to solve 'big picture' problems in paleoclimatology. 
  

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Logistics

Instructor: Michael Evans , Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, 214 W. Stadium.  ph 626-2897;  email: mevans@ltrr.arizona.edu.  Office hours: Monday, 4-5pm, W. Stadium 214, or by appointment.  Please email for more information.  I will try to answer emails within 24 hours.

Location and Time:
Introductory meeting: Wednesday, January 14th, 2004, Tree-Ring Lab-West Seminar Room (Rm. 20), 1pm.  
Regular Meeting Time: Wednesdays, 1:30-3:30pm.

Registration info:   There are multiple "modules" of GEOS 595E taught each semester; you may register for 2 units which comprises the module described here, and/or for other modules.  See the 2004 Dendrochronology Colloquium Overview webpage for this semester's offerings, and more details.

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Prerequisite:  An interest in the application of paleoclimatological methods, broadly defined, to current problems in climate change research.   You may wish to fill in your background as we go by having at hand a favorite text on paleoclimate research methods.  A good recent one is by R.S. Bradley, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary.

Additional reading and course materials: I will  provide them electronically as password protected PDF files, served from this webpage.

Assignments:

1. Weekly: 
• A commitment to closely reading the assigned literature (~4-6 hrs/week) and active participation in discussions is absolutely essential.  Class sessions will vary in style with leader, but in general, expect to have some introductory lecture, a fair amount of time for discussion of controversial points and answering questions raised during your reading, and summation by the leader or by participants.  To extract the maximum from the experts we've assembled, be prepared and bring questions.
• Skim the reading for organization and the 'big picture'.
• Read closely a second time for the following questions:
• What paleoclimate questions motivate the use of this tool?
• What is the theory, or model, for application of the tool?  What are its major strengths and weaknesses?
• What are the most exiciting future advances or applications for this tool?
• One student will be assigned at random, at end of each class, to write a short summary of the lecture and conclusions drawn during discussion/debate.    This will be posted to the course web pages for the benefit of everyone.
• You should also be thinking about the end-of-semester assignment, which is described below.
2. End-of-semester:
• A proposal, not to exceed 10 pages of text plus figures and references, which describes an innovative approach to a paleoclimate problem, and whose experimental design employs multiple tools or techniques studied over the course of the semester.  Depending on the size of the class we may complete this assignment in small groups.  
• Draft proposals will be circulated to classmates for constructive criticism (graded).
• Finalized proposals will be presented as a 15 minute AGU-style presentation (graded).
• Finalized written proposals will be reviewed by Mike with support from participating faculty (graded).

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Syllabus (subject to revision)
 

When	Topic	Discussion Leader	Assignment
January 14th	Introduction; Logistics	Mike Evans (LTRR)	Course questionnaire
January 21st	Motivating questions in Paleoclimatology	Jonathan Overpeck (ISPE/GEOS) summary by Leslie McCluskey	NRC (1999), Ch. 6 (Paleoclimate), pp. 268-277 [1208Kb] Rind (2002) [324Kb] Alley et al. (2003) [368Kb]
January 28th	Stable isotope geochemistry: Carbonates	Jay Quade (USGS/GEOS) summary by Kevin Anchukaitis	Winograd and Szabo (1986) [1.5Mb] Winograd (1986) [2Mb] Quade and Cerling (1990) [1Mb]
February 4th (Note Mike's office hours are 1:30-2:30pm, Mon., Feb. 2nd)	Paleoecology: Packrat Midden Analysis	Julio Betancourt (USGS/GEOS) summary by Heidi Barnett Julio's powerpoint lecture is here [29Mb]	Betancourt (2003) [471Kb] Lyford et al., (2003) [2.8Mb] Thompson (1993) [to be posted Friday]
February  11th	Minor element geochemistry: Carbonates	Julie Cole (GEOS) summary by Jim Morrison Julie's powerpoint lecture is here [11Mb]	Lea (2004), pp. 17-36  [2.1Mb] (preprint of Ch. 14 of Volume 9 of the Treatise on Geochemistry)
February 18th	Stable isotope geochemistry: Organics	Steve Leavitt (LTRR) summary by Peggy Barker	Huang et al. (2001) [310Kb] Baker et al. (2000) [400Kb] Van de Water (2000) [144Kb]
February 25th	Passive Tracers: Isotope hydrology	Brenda Ekwurzel (HWR/GEOS) summary by Scott St. George	Farrera et al. (1999) [664Kb] Greene et al. (2002) [473Kb] Optional background reasing: Stute and Schlosser, Chapter 11 from Cook and Herczeg (2000) [4.5Mb] Reading focus questions are here.
March 3rd	Radiocarbon geochronology	Tim Jull (PHYS/AMS) summary by Mike Evans	Jull et al. (2004) [360Kb]
March 10th	Th/U geochronology	Warren Beck (PHYS/AMS) summary by Jessica Rowland	Edwards et al. (2003) [1.7Mb] Beck et al. (2001) [414Kb] Optional: Richards and Dorale (2003)  [1.4Mb] Ivanovich and Harmon (1982) [6.3Mb]
March 17th	Spring Break - no class
March 24th	Dendrochronology	Jeff Dean (LTRR/ANTH) summary by Jessica Rowland	Dean (1988) [5.2Mb] Dean et al. (1999) [3.4Mb] A link to a nice 2002 Atlantic Monthly piece by J. Rauch, which discusses the idea of 'agent-based' modeling, is here.
March 31st	Dendroclimatology	Malcolm Hughes (LTRR) summary by Leslie McCluskey html slides are here. powerpoint is here [33Mb]	Hughes (2002) [3.9Mb] Hughes et al. (1984) [3.2Mb] Hughes et al. (1994) [622Kb] Briffa et al. (1998) [424Kb] Vaganov et al. (1999) [366Kb] Readung focus questions are here.
April 7th	Paleolimnology	Andy Cohen (GEOS) summary by Peggy Barker html slides are here. powerpoint is here [38Mb]	Cohen (2003), Ch. 1 [4.3Mb] Cohen et al. (2000) [354Kb] Dean et al. (2002) [1.4Mb] Johnson et al., (2002) [223Kb]
April 14th	Statistical Reconstruction of Paleoclimates	Mike Evans (LTRR) summary by Heidi Barnett html slides are here. powerpoint is here [29Mb] slides drawn in class are here. [309Kb]	Evans et al. (2001a) [170Kb] Evans et al. (2001b) [2.4Mb] Reading/discussion focus questions are here.
April 21st	Climate System/Paleoclimate Modeling	Andrea Hahmann (ATMO) summary by Kevin Anchukaitis powerpoint is here [3.9Mb]	McGuffie and Henderson-Sellers (2001) [3.2Mb] Bush and Philander (1998) [479Kb]
April 28th	Student Projects: peer evaluation of drafts; discussions and meetings with discussion leaders Office Hours Monday, April 26th, 3:30 -5pm, W. Stadium 214	Class participants	Draft proposals due Wednesday, April 28th in class.  Bring 3 copies: one for yourself, one for peer evaluation, and one for Mike.
May 5th	Student Projects: Presentation	Class participants	Final proposals due Friday, May 7th, 4pm, to Mike

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