Borehole climatology : a new method on how to reconstruct climate / Louise Bodri and Vladimir Cermak.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bodri, Louise.

Contributor:

Čermák, Vladimír.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Paleoclimatology--Holocene.

Paleoclimatology.

Paleoclimatology--Methodology.

Physical Description:

ix, 335 pages, 2 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; Boston : Elsevier, 2007.

Summary:

Our climate has been undergoing significant change, and at present we witness a warming the rate of which is unparalleled in recent history. Air temperature rises and the weather variability increases. If the observed warming is to continue, serious environmental consequences are unavoidable. As a consequence of the awareness of the potential social and political impacts of climate change, not only scientists but many non-specialists need more and better information of what has been really happening. Knowledge of the climate evolution over the past millennium is important to understand the present warming in its long-term perspective.

Climate changes are accompanied by corresponding changes in the mean air temperature. Temperature variations penetrate downward into shallows underground and are stored there as tiny departures of the temperature field. The Earth's subsurface presents an archive of past climate data which can be inferred by inversion of the measured temperature-depth logs. Borehole paleoclimatology enables climate reconstruction of the past several millennia and unlike proxy methods provides direct past temperature assessments.

Borehole Climatology gives an account of various methods of the paleoclimate reconstruction and on this background introduces a new method. This book explains the capacity of the subsurface temperature field to 'remember' what happened on the surface and how this memory can be utilized. It explains the principles of the 'geothermal' method and summarizes major results to reconstruct climate scenarios spanning from Holocene to Recent. The final goal is to assess the magnitude of the present-day warming and to distinguish between the natural climate variability and the potential human contribution due to environmental pollution. This book will be useful for advanced undergraduate students and researchers in geophysical and environmental sciences. It can also provide a non-specialist introduction. This book is abundantly illustrated and completed with numerous references.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Background and history of the problem 1

1.1 The climate of the Holocene 1

1.2 Principal sources of data on the Earth's climate system 10

1.2.2 Short-term climate changes 15

1.2.3 Medium- and long-term climate changes 19

1.3 Borehole climatology 27

Chapter 2 Climate change and subsurface temperature 37

2.1 Methods and technique to carry out borehole temperature measurements 39

2.2 Subsurface temperature field and its response to changing surface conditions (climate) 41

2.3 Geothermal method of climate reconstruction: principles, resolution, limitations (forward and inverse techniques, sources of perturbation) 49

2.3.1 Background and history 49

2.3.2 Theory of 1-D heat conduction 50

2.3.3 Ramp/step method 52

2.3.4 Singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithm 53

2.3.5 Least squares inversion in functional space (FSI) 60

2.3.6 General comparison of the methods 62

2.4 Comparison of ground surface temperature (GST) reconstruction methods 64

2.4.1 Effects of smoothing constraints in different methods and the noise in the data: synthetic examples 65

2.4.2 Effect of systematic errors in thermal conductivity 72

2.4.3 Using additional information: field example 77

2.4.4 Recent testing of borehole inversion methods in simulated climates 82

2.4.5 Interpreting ensembles of borehole temperature logs 86

2.5 Ground-air temperature coupling: pre-observational mean temperature (POM) 89

2.6 Ground-air temperature coupling: effect of various environmental changes 96

2.6.2 Snow cover and ground freezing 98

2.6.3 Effect of precipitation 106

2.6.4 Effect of surface vegetation 116

2.6.5 Long-term soil-air temperature coupling 123

2.6.6 Other possible terrain effects 128

2.7 Non-conductive heat transfer effect on the GST reconstruction (groundwater flow effects) 133

2.8 Climate change and permafrost 149

2.9 Climate from ice boreholes 165

Chapter 3 Ground temperature histories: evidence of changing climate 175

3.1 Timescales of the reconstructed GST histories (from Ice Age to the Present) 175

3.1.1 GST changes in the last two millennia (spatial and temporal patterns) 177

3.1.2 Recent warming 196

3.2 Temperature trends over past five centuries reconstructed from borehole temperature data (spatial and temporal patterns) 208

3.3 Correlation between GST climate reconstruction, meteorological data, and proxies 219

3.4 Is there any anthropogenic component in the present-day global warming? Evidence from the underground 226

3.4.2 Greenhouse gases and climate change 228

3.4.3 Was the twentieth century climate unusual? Evidence from the underground 232

3.4.4 The elements of optimal detection of the climate change and attribution of the causes 235

3.4.5 Granger causality to investigate the human influence on climate 245

3.5 Deep continental drilling and signature of remote climate changes 250

3.5.1 Late Quaternary GST changes inferred from the deep hole measurements 250

3.5.2 Climate signature in superdeep boreholes 260

Chapter 4 Subsurface temperature monitoring: present-day temperature change and its variability 267

4.1 Geothermal observatories and subsurface temperature monitoring 267

4.2 Detection of the present-day warming by temperature monitoring in shallow boreholes 269

4.2.1 Emigrant pass observatory, Utah 279

4.2.2 The Sornfelli borehole 280

4.2.3 Kamchatka 281

4.2.4 Livingston Island, Antarctic 282

4.3 Recent climate variability 283

4.3.1 Climate change and climate variability 283

4.3.2 Trends in the recent climate variability 287

4.3.3 Structure of the stochastic component of the short-term climate variability 295

Conclusions and perspectives of future progress 305.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780080453200

0080453201

OCLC:

153553202