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Analysis of the Moberg et al. (2005) hemispheric temperature reconstruction

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Abstract

The Moberg et al. (Nature 433(7026):613–617, 2005. doi:10.1038/nature03265; M05) reconstruction of northern hemisphere temperature variations from proxy data has been criticised; the M05 method may artificially inflate low-frequency variance relative to reality. We test this assertion by undertaking several pseudoproxy experiments in three climate model simulations—one control run and two forced simulations that include several time-varying radiative forcings. The pseudoproxy series are designed to have the same variance spectra as the real M05 proxies, primarily to mimic the low-resolution character of several series. A simple composite-plus-scale (CPS) method is also analysed. In the CPS case all input data behave like annually resolved proxies. The spectral domain performance of both M05 and CPS is found to be dependent on the noise type and noise level in pseudoproxies, on the variance spectrum of the climate model simulation, and on the degree of data smoothing. CPS performs better than M05 in most investigated cases with the control run, but leads to deflated low-frequency variance in some cases. With M05, low-frequency variance tend to be inflated for the control run but not for one of the forced runs and only very slightly with the other forced simulation. Hence, the M05 approach does not routinely inflate low-frequency variance. In our experiment, the M05 approach performs better in the spectral domain than CPS when applied to forced climate model simulations. The results underscore the importance of evaluating the variance spectrum of climate reconstructions.

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Acknowledgments

This is a contribution from the Bert Bolin Centre for Climate Research, funded by the Swedish Research Councils VR and FORMAS. AM is funded by VR. AM and RM’s work was part of the EU-project MILLENNIUM (co-ordinated by Danny McCarroll, University of Wales, Swansea, contract no. 017008). TM’s work was part of the MITRIE project, funded by the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency (contract to Martin Juckes, British Atmospheric Data Centre). We thank Danny McCarroll, Dmitry Divine, Jan Esper, David Frank, Rob Wilson and Eduardo Zorita for discussions and valuable comments. Zorita also provided the ECHO-G climate model data. Two anonymous reviewers helped to improve the analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Anders Moberg

  2. Department of Geology and Geochemistry, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Rezwan Mohammad

  3. Department of Meteorology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Thorsten Mauritsen

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  1. Anders Moberg
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  2. Rezwan Mohammad
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  3. Thorsten Mauritsen
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Correspondence to Anders Moberg.

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Moberg, A., Mohammad, R. & Mauritsen, T. Analysis of the Moberg et al. (2005) hemispheric temperature reconstruction. Clim Dyn 31, 957–971 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-008-0392-8

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