Investigating southern African Holocene climate - bridging from the early Holocene to today
Final Report Abstract
There are two important scientific advances in this project. Firstly, the downscaling of an isotope-enabled global model with an isotope-enable regional model can improve the comparison to isotope records from a paleoclimate archive. Secondly, an isotope tracer-enabled regional model allows to better disentangle the effects of temperature, precipitation amount and moisture source change on the isotopic composition of precipitation, which refines the interpretation of the climate change signal contained in the isotope record of a paleoclimate archive. These two advances are of course very promising for future applications of this modeling chain. The main surprise was the regional modeling result with a much-reduced mid-Holocene-to-preindustrial precipitation increase in comparison to the global model, which led to a much-reduced and much more realistic precipitation deuterium decrease according to the paleoclimate archives. In other words, the three-year modeling effort carried on in this project finally led to a result improvement, which was not granted at the beginning of the project.
Publications
- (2021) A joint soil-vegetation-atmospheric modeling procedure of water isotopologues: Implementation and application to different climate zones with WRF-Hydro-iso. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 13, e2021MS002562
Arnault J, Jung G, Haese B, Fersch B, Rummler T, Wei J, Zhang Z, Kunstmann H
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1029/2021MS002562)
