Southern Hemisphere Paleo- and Neoclimates: Key Sites, Methods, Data and Models

Climate models show that climate change is not a uniform process. Areas of increased temperature are situated near areas of decreased temperature, areas with increased precipitation adjoin areas of drought. This is one of the reasons why climate change is so difficult to detect. Any parameter must be considered and tested locally or regionally and not on an average globally. This book gives an overview of current research methods and results in the different fields of climate research including modelling. In addition, it contains a hemisphere-wide stratigraphic data base with about 80000 species. All paleoclimatic data as well as a state-of-the-art atmospheric circulation model in a PC version are included. So both research and graduate teaching are supported with high-end software running on affordable computers, also in those countries that have no access to Cray super computers. Thus, this book will be of interest to all researchers and scientists in the field of climatology.

Climate change and the impact of climate change will affect societies all over the world. This includes temperature and precipitation changes as well as indirect changes such as shifted vegetation belts. Furthermore, CO2 changes may cause major environmental stress for bacteria and viruses potentially supporting the formation of new species, including pests and diseases.
Thus, as a result of the UNESCO Project IGCP-341, one can obtain:
Regional and large-scale reconstructions and usable data (time series and maps) of greenhouse climates.
Information to compile a set of worldwide uniform high-resolution biostratigraphic data.
Regional studies of altered rainforests in Amazonia and Africa.
Meteorological, historical and dendroclimatological (hemispherewide) studies on recent and ongoing climate changes showing the differential nature of precipitation and temperature change.
Software for river network simulation as well as time-series analysis and prediction (monsoonal rainfall) such as neural networks and chaos detection.
A PC version (Windows NT 4.0) of a large-scale atmospheric circulation model (T42 resolution, 18 vertical layers). This enables meteorological and geological institutions, also in low-budget regions, to run respective simulations, e.g. on a Pentium II/300. One modeled day takes only 35 min.
All data on the accompanying CD (including a large set of worldwide biostratigraphical reference data, paleotemperature data and back-rotated drillholes) can be accessed easily, independently of the software used.