Climate of the Past

This special provides a cross-section of the research presented at the 2nd Young Scientists Meeting of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) project, held on 11-12 February 2013 in Goa, India. All first authors are early-career researchers who have attended the meeting. Thematically the papers lie within the scientific scope of PAGES, i.e. they address the processes of past climatic and environmental change, as well as the methodologies required to study them.

This special issue provides a venue for presentations given in a series of workshops in Taiwan on "Western Pacific Paleoceanography" sponsored by the International Marine Past Global Changes Study (IMAGES). The special issue focuses on paleoceanographic and paleoclimatic studies that investigate changes in the western Pacific region at time scales from orbital to centennial.

This special issue originates from the EU FP7-Marie Curie initative "CASE" (The Changing Arctic and Subarctic Environment), an Initial Training Network on marine biotic indicators of recent climate changes in the high latitudes of the North Atlantic (http://caseitn.epoc.u-bordeaux1.fr/). It implements multidisciplinary research initiatives aiming at assembling paleoclimate data from the Holocene through recent field programmes in the Nordic Seas, and at integrating paleoclimate information with modern biological and climate modelling data.

This primary aim of this Special Issue is to highlight research results from the third phase of the Paleoclimate Modelling Inter-comparison Project (PMIP3). The remit of PMIP has expanded beyond modelling snapshots of the mid Holocene at 6ka and Last Glacial Maximum. In this third phase of the project, the Last Millennium, the 8.2ka Event, the Last Interglacial and the Pliocene are included, and interests within the project extend to the Last Termination, and the Eocene. Papers that relate to modelling any of these intervals using one or more models are welcome. Those containing critical analysis of model performance compared to data, and exploring implications for future climate change are particularly encouraged.

Scientific papers aiming at a better understanding of climate dynamics using quantitative paleoclimate analyses are eligible for publication in this special issue. We invite especially contributions resulting from the INTERDYNAMIC Program and resulting from proxy-based climate reconstructions (terrestrial and marine as well as ice-core archives) in combination with results from Earth-system models. Contributions should focus on the interglacials of the late Quaternary (incl. their onset and end) on global and continent- or basin-wide scales.

This special issue of Climate of the Past is the proceedings volume of the final workshop of project «LAMA» held at Fréjus (France) in March 2011. This project funded by the French ANR focused on the reconstruction of Holocene changes in environment and climate in the central Mediterranean. It is based on the study of sites along a north-south transect and on a combination of both marine and lacustrine records.