Editor's Summary

27 August 2009

Taking the long view of temperature

Most high-resolution climate reconstructions for the past millennia have focused on Northern Hemisphere land records. Ocean reconstructions have to date been rare and, critically, have missed the most recent centuries, preventing a comparison with the observational records. A new reconstruction of sea surface temperatures for the Indo-Pacific warm pool now provides a decadally resolved record that spans the last two millennia and overlaps the instrumental record, enabling both a direct calibration of proxy data to the instrumental record and an evaluation of past changes in the context of twentieth century trends. The data show that while recent decades have been anomalously warm, they are statistically indistinguishable from temperatures prevailing during the Medieval Warm Period from around AD 1000 to AD 1250

Letter: 2,000-year-long temperature and hydrology reconstructions from the Indo-Pacific warm pool

Delia W. Oppo, Yair Rosenthal & Braddock K. Linsley

doi:10.1038/nature08233

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