Rethinking paleoclimatology for society

This will develop new routes for impact in palaeoclimatology and will lead a vital step change in my field of research. Annual to decadal climate predictions may offer important information to Climate Services and Environmental Agencies, which would help guide short- and medium-term climate change strategies. For example, a better knowledge of the frequency and magnitude of floods in the UK. Decadal climate predictions are skilful for surface temperature, but confidence in projections of atmospheric pattern and the associated ecosystem response are less robust. This is, in part, because the amplitude of the decadal climate response is difficult to verify by the available instrumental data (reanalyses), which only goes back a century or two, and the impact of superimposed low-frequency variability might not be well represented. One way to provide more information on the decadal climate response is to include high-temporal resolution palaeoclimate timeseries in reanalyses. So far, the availability of proxy data suitable for this purpose is limited by the nature of the data (qualitative vs quantitative), chronological constrains (dating uncertainty and time-resolution of the proxy records) and geographical location of the proxy records (i.e limited to specific climate regions as ice-cores and corals), hence the study of decadal climate variability in the past is still in its infancy. In order to make developments in this field, I will lead an international research team that integrates palaeoclimatologists and climate modellers. We will combine emerging methodological approaches in proxy developments, chronological constraints, statistical tools and data-model comparison to provide advanced information of past decadal climate variability in the North Atlantic-European region such as shifting atmospheric circulation and occurrence of extreme weather events; and we will develop emergent constraints based on past climate scenarios to be applied to decadal prediction systems..