Using data assimilation to investigate the causes of Southern Hemisphere high latitude cooling from 10 to 8 ka BP

Mathiot, P.; Goosse, H.; Crosta, X.; Stenni, B.; Braida, M.; Renssen, H.; Van Meerbeeck, C.J.; Masson-Delmotte, V.; Mairesse, A.; Dubinkina, S.. 2013 Using data assimilation to investigate the causes of Southern Hemisphere high latitude cooling from 10 to 8 ka BP. Climate of the Past, 9 (2). 887-901. https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-9-887-2013

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-9-887-2013

Abstract/Summary

From 10 to 8 ka BP (thousand years before present), paleoclimate records show an atmospheric and oceanic cooling in the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. During this interval, temperatures estimated from proxy data decrease by 0.8 °C over Antarctica and 1.2 °C over the Southern Ocean. In order to study the causes of this cooling, simulations covering the early Holocene have been performed with the climate model of intermediate complexity LOVECLIM constrained to follow the signal recorded in climate proxies using a data assimilation method based on a particle filtering approach. The selected proxies represent oceanic and atmospheric surface temperature in the Southern Hemisphere derived from terrestrial, marine and glaciological records. Two mechanisms previously suggested to explain the 10–8 ka BP cooling pattern are investigated using the data assimilation approach in our model. The first hypothesis is a change in atmospheric circulation, and the second one is a cooling of the sea surface temperature in the Southern Ocean, driven in our experimental setup by the impact of an increased West Antarctic melting rate on ocean circulation. For the atmosphere hypothesis, the climate state obtained by data assimilation produces a modification of the meridional atmospheric circulation leading to a 0.5 °C Antarctic cooling from 10 to 8 ka BP compared to the simulation without data assimilation, without congruent cooling of the atmospheric and sea surface temperature in the Southern Ocean. For the ocean hypothesis, the increased West Antarctic freshwater flux constrainted by data assimilation (+100 mSv from 10 to 8 ka BP) leads to an oceanic cooling of 0.7 °C and a strengthening of Southern Hemisphere westerlies (+6%). Thus, according to our experiments, the observed cooling in Antarctic and the Southern Ocean proxy records can only be reconciled with the reconstructions by the combination of a modified atmospheric circulation and an enhanced freshwater flux.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-9-887-2013
Programmes:	BAS Programmes > Polar Science for Planet Earth (2009 - ) > Polar Oceans
ISSN:	1814-9332
Additional Information. Not used in RCUK Gateway to Research.:	Open access article made available under a CC-BY Creative Commons Attribution license
Date made live:	14 May 2013 10:54 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/501903

Item Type:

Publication - Article

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-9-887-2013

Programmes:

BAS Programmes > Polar Science for Planet Earth (2009 - ) > Polar Oceans

ISSN:

1814-9332

Additional Information. Not used in RCUK Gateway to Research.:

Open access article made available under a CC-BY Creative Commons Attribution license

Date made live:

14 May 2013 10:54 +0 (UTC)