Objective
The aim of this project is to describe how the climate system and, in particular, the global ice sheets have responded to changes in the incoming solar radiation over the last 250,000 years, with particular emphasis on the glacial inceptions which started roughly 238,000 and 122,000 years ago. The specific objectives are: to reconstruct long-term variations of some fundamental climate variables from ice core proxy records over two climatic cycles and to simulate how the climate has entered into glaciation after the peak of isotopic stages 5.5 and 7.5 i.e. about 122,000 and 238,000 years ago; to use low-order models involving all components of the climate system, three-dimensional ice sheet models and general circulation models of the atmosphere and ocean to investigate both spatial and temporal components of environmental change through two well known cycles where the geometry of the evolution of ice sheets has been different; to determine the feedback processes which best explain how astronomical forcing can be amplified to lead to rapid growth of ice sheets over north America and Eurasia; and to study the dynamics of the ice sheets, in particular their initiation and the circulation modes on the atmosphere related to different phases of their development.
Glaciation-deglaciation processes during the last two glacial cycles, together with related climatic variations, represent a natural model of recent and possible future changes of climate. Appropriate reconstructed palaeo data give important independent information on regularities of processes in the ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere land system.
Researches of west- and east European scientists in this scientific domain are co-ordinated and supported in the framework of the Project EV5V-CT92-0118 Global ice sheets during last two climatic cycles, with an emphasis on entering into glaciation of the Commission of the European Communities. The current project will extend, in the stochastic and dynamic-stochastic aspects of the problem, the scope of the west European original project in order to provide a better understanding of climatic mechanisms.
A Russian databank of time series describing the history of ice sheets on the territory of Russia will be created. These data will complement those compiled by the Edinburgh Grant Institute for north America and Europe.
Stochastic models of Russian and foreign time series, describing the changes during the last two climatic cycles, will be obtained.
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
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1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium