Precipitation in the Past Millennium in Europe—Extension to Roman Times - Integrated Analysis of Interglacial Climate Dynamics (INTERDYNAMIC) - page 126

Precipitation in the Past Millennium
in Europe — Extension to Roman Times

Juan Jose G mez-Navarro, Johannes P. Werner, Sebastian Wagner,

Eduardo Zorita and J

ó

ü rg Luterbacher

Abstract This project aimed at describing the evolution of precipitation and its
variability over Europe and the Mediterranean over the last two millennia. We
present results from dynamical downscaling, showing the added value of regional
climate models in the paleoclimate context. The regional models improve the
representation of precipitation patterns and variability compared to the raw global
climate model output and indicate periods with warmer/drier and colder/wetter
summer conditions throughout the last two millennia, including for instance the
Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age. Additionally, based on the
regional simulations pseudoproxies are generated to test the analog method and
Bayesian inference. The application of the Bayesian and analog methods to pseu-
doproxies show reasonable skill and can be used as a statistical tools for the
reconstruction of hydrological-sensitive proxy data and might be appropriate
methods to be applied to real proxies in the future.

Keywords Natural climate variability Late holocene Regional climate mod-

elling Bayesian hierarchical modelling Precipitation reconstructions Changes

in hydrological cycle