Friday, February 17, 2006

Last Interglacial

[edit: 8:30am: B. Otto-Bliesner: Interglacial run at the CCSM Paleo Climate Working Group meeting]

The interglacial is interesting because this is the last time that temperatures during the summer seasons were near what they are now in the late Holocene.

There was open water over north of Alaska and Canada in the summer: one researcher came out just now and stated that there hasn't been any ice identified from Greenland from this period. The Greenland icecap was greatly reduced. The researcher stated that there was some indications that there is ice cores with ice from this time period from Antarctica. It was a lot warmer than today in Antarctica, over 5 C warmer. West Antarctica Ice Sheet was much smaller from sediment research during this time period. Iceland was completely ice free in the last interglacial.

Oh, badbadbad. They didn't mess with the vegation at all. They had it exactly as today. Didn't we cover this one already? Bad researcher! Bad! No CPU cycles for you! Okay, some CPU cycles for you, you stated that this is slated to be changed in the future runs.

A lot of this talk is based on the ice sheets and their height and breadth and some for sea level rise, but not much.

Ok. Looking back at the schedule, it looks like that either they rearranged things or they slipped something else in before the production run discussions so that might be why I was so confused aboutt he first talk.

They're proposing that they upgrade their sim from CCSM 2 to CCSM 3. Good! They really want to look at the water rising and Greenland ice sheet behavior when they have a mutually coupled simulation. The previous one was not coupled both ways, but one way. They want to also observe what happens when the all that fresh water gets dumped into the North Atlantic and the currents there. Related note from the news. She showed some sat data (that I could see right now) about the extent of the Greenland ice sheet in 1992 and 2005. The difference was supposed to be impressive. Or depressive.


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