[Aqualist] Australian palaeoclimate meeting June 27th-28th

[turney at uow.edu.au]

RECONSTRUCTING PAST CLIMATES FOR FUTURE PREDICTION: INTEGRATING 
HIGH-RESOLUTION PALAEO DATA FOR MEANINGFUL PREDICTION IN THE 
AUSTRALASIAN REGION

Monday 27th & Tuesday 28th June 2005
Australian Academy of Sciences
Canberra ACT Australia

Held under the auspices of the Australian Academy of Science’s National 
Committee for Earth System Science and IGBP PAGES and jointly funded by the 
Australian Greenhouse Office and the Australian Research Council Research 
Network ‘Discovering the Past and Present to Shape the Future’

There exists a wealth of indicators of past climate that show rapid changes have 
taken place. Such indicators could be used to understand the range of past, 
present and future climate variability. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the 
Australasian region that straddles several major atmospheric and oceanic 
boundaries (many of which are interconnected) which have the potential to be 
highly sensitive under a variety of future climate change scenarios (e.g. El Niño-
Southern Oscillation, Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, Australian Monsoon, East 
Australian Current, the Leeuwin Current and the mid-latitude westerlies).

This 2-day workshop will bring together climatologists (palaeo and 
contemporary) and modellers working on a variety of different palaeoclimatic 
and historical datasets spanning the last 60,000 years to discuss their results 
within the context of past and future change in the region.  The workshop will 
allow the presentation of the latest different palaeoclimatic datasets of relevance 
to the Australia and New Zealand region (from the ice, marine and terrestrial 
realms) and place the results in a global context.  The workshop will provide an 
opportunity for the scientific community to discuss ways in which this data can 
be used more effectively to help us understand climate mechanisms for 
predicting future climate change and its variability on the millennial, centennial, 
decadal and annual timescales. 

To enhance the utility of the data in modelling applications, discussion will be 
made of the ways in which future research should be directed to develop 
methods of integrating and characterising the diverse palaeo indicators on a 
regional spatial scale.  Additionally, it will be necessary to quantify the 
uncertainties associated with both the palaeo data and any resulting climate 
reconstructions. Nowhere is this more relevant than for the past millennium 
where reconstructions for the Northern Hemisphere have generated a robust 
discussion in the scientific community of methodological approaches to 
datasets.  The workshop will pave the way for new and robust methods for 
reconstructing past climatic changes in the Australasian region for comparison 
to other datasets from around the world (including the Northern Hemisphere 
‘hockey stick’ curve). The workshop will identify records where the assembly of 
data will provide higher temporal and spatial resolution than have previously 
been available (or attempted), and the provision of data in a manner suitable for 
use in model validation (including the last glacial-interglacial transition which is 
the focus of the INQUA Australasian INTIMATE Project). Participants who have 
attempted to calibrate palaeo data against existing instrumental climate records 
are keenly encouraged to attend. 

Confirmed speakers include:
Dr Ed Cook (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)
Dr Mike Gagan (Australian National University)
Dr Kate Harle (CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystem)
Dr Neville Nicholls (Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre)
Dr Bryant McAveney (Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre)
Prof. Henry Pollack (University of Michigan)
A./Prof. J.P. Steffenson (University of Copenhagen)

Further details including registration can be found at: http://www.uow.edu.au/
conferences/canberra/


Please accept our apologies if you have received this information via a different 
route.
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Dr. Chris Turney
President to the INQUA Sub-Commission for Tephrochronology and Volcanism
(SCOTAV)
Web page: http://www.gns.cri.nz/inquatephra/
Tephra extraction techniques virtual workshop:
http://www.qub.ac.uk/arcpal/Tephra/Tephratrace/Home.htm

Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Wollongong
Wollongong
NSW 2522
Australia

Home page: http://www.uow.edu.au/science/eesc/staff/cturney/ct.html
E-mail: turney at uow.edu.au 
Tel.: +61 2 4221 3561
Fax.: +61 2 4221 4250

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Slartibartfast:  Science has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day
Arthur Dent:  And are you?
Slartibartfast:  No.  Thats where it all falls down of course.
Arthur Dent:  Pity.  It sounded like quite a good lifestyle otherwise.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

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