Abstract
AbstractCentennial‐to‐millennial temperature records of the past provide a context for the interpretation of current and future changes in climate. Quaternary climates have been relatively well studied in north‐east North America and the adjacent Atlantic Ocean over the last decades, and new research methods have been developed to improve reconstructions. We present newly inferred reconstructions of sea surface temperature for the north‐western Atlantic region, together with a compilation of published temperature records. The database thus comprises a total of 86 records from both marine and terrestrial sites, including lakes, peatlands, ice and tree rings, each covering at least part of the Holocene. For each record, we present details on seasons covered, chronologies and information on radiocarbon dates and analytical time steps. The 86 records contain a total of 154 reconstructions of temperature and temperature‐related variables. Main proxies include pollen and dinocysts, while summer was the season for which the highest number of reconstructions were available. Many records covered most of the Holocene, but many dinocyst records did not extend to the surface, due to sediment mixing, and dendroclimate records were limited to the last millennium. The database allows for the exploration of linkages between sea ice and climate and may be used in conjunction with other palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental records, such as wildfire records and peatland dynamics. This inventory may also aid the identification of gaps in the geographic distribution of past temperature records thus guiding future research efforts.
Highlights
Long-term climate records provide a context for the interpretation of recent environmental changes
We present a database of climate records that covers the eastern Canadian Arctic and Greenland in addition to the boreal and temperate regions of north-east North America and the north-west North Atlantic, which include some of the records presented by Sundqvist et al (2014)
Climate reconstructions are generally obtained from sediment cores by the analysis of past assemblages of fossilized organisms and isotope data combined with chronologies established by radiometric dating methods, such as 14C
Summary
Long-term climate records provide a context for the interpretation of recent environmental changes. Such records are valuable at high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere as recent and ongoing climate warming is most pronounced there (Screen and Simmonds, 2010). The Quaternary climate dynamics have been intensively studied in north-east North America and the adjacent Atlantic Ocean, but the ensemble of terrestrial and marine records from this vast region have never been aggregated and presented as a coherent source of information. We present a database of climate records that covers the eastern Canadian Arctic and Greenland in addition to the boreal and temperate regions of north-east North America and the north-west North Atlantic, which include some of the records presented by Sundqvist et al (2014). The climate reconstructions presented here include variables directly related to air temperature, such as lake and sea surface temperature as well as sea ice cover, representing an indirect indicator of temperature
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