Abstract
Annually laminated (varved) lake sediments constitutes excellent environmental archives, and have the potential to play an important role for understanding past seasonal climate with their inherent annual time resolution and within-year seasonal patterns. We propose to use functional data analysis methods to extract the relevant information with respect to climate reconstruction from the rich but complex information in the varves, including the shapes of the seasonal patterns, the varying varve thickness, and the non-linear sediment accumulation rates. In particular we analyze varved sediment from lake Kassjön in northern Sweden, covering the past 6400 years. The properties of each varve reflect to a large extent weather conditions and internal biological processes in the lake the year that the varve was deposited. Functional clustering is used to group the seasonal patterns into different types, that can be associated with different weather conditions. The seasonal patterns were described by penalized splines and clustered by the k-means algorithm, after alignment. The observed (within-year) variability in the data was used to determine the degree of smoothing for the penalized spline approximations. The resulting clusters and their time dynamics show great potential for seasonal climate interpretation, in particular for winter climate changes.
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Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge valuable comments from two anonymous reviewers. This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council, (Project id D0520301 and 90432301).
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Appendix
Appendix
The Kassjön data covers 6388 years with an error of ± 60 years (Petterson 1999). The varve countings starts from the top of the sediment (1901) and the varve error adds up when calculating so the number of varves are most correct in the beginning, at 1901. The data are recorded yearly and below is a sample from the record.
The maximum number of observations per year is 36 and the minimum is 3. The data covers 1901 AD to BC 4486. 62 years are missing and they are listed in the table below. In the table the −sign means BC.
Missing years | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
-4463 | -4460 | -4457 | -4454 | -4451 | -4448 | -4444 |
-4438 | -4423 | -4224 | -4034 | -4033 | -4006 | -4004 |
-4002 | -3605 | -3594 | -3550 | -3478 | -3442 | -3393 |
-2912 | -2888 | -2804 | -2791 | -2718 | -2544 | -2466 |
-2411 | -2408 | -2176 | -2128 | -2119 | -1634 | -1631 |
-1474 | -1379 | -1143 | -1062 | -1060 | -1027 | -729 |
-711 | -708 | -415 | -342 | -339 | -164 | -68 |
991 | 993 | 1251 | 1309 | 1454 | 1473 | 1477 |
1489 | 1492 | 1500 | 1688 | 1755 | 1848 | |
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Arnqvist, P., Bigler, C., Renberg, I. et al. Functional clustering of varved lake sediment to reconstruct past seasonal climate. Environ Ecol Stat 23, 513–529 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10651-016-0351-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10651-016-0351-1