new s Vol 21 • No 2 • August 2013 www.pages-igbp.org El Niño-Southern Oscillation Editors: Pascale Braconnot, Chris Brierley, Sandy P. Harrison, Lucien von Gunten and Thorsten Kiefer Beyond just beautiful - Tridacna spp. are faithfully recording paleoENSO variability. These giant, long-lived bivalves are reef dwelling organisms characteristic of the Indo-Pacific region. The presence of symbionts provides the multitude of colors commonly observed in Tridacna spp. p. 72-79 Mini section on data assimilation Inside PAGES Celebrating 20 years Committee and an Interim Secretariat Guest scientists In this issue we celebrate 20 years of PAGES with an Interim Director. You can check the We are pleased to welcome two guest news. You can read our paleobibliographic names of the personnel on the Future Earth scientists to the PAGES office this sum- analysis on the next page, and take a trip website (www.icsu.org/future-earth) and mer: Gisela Winckler from the Lamont- back in time and enjoy the first ever copy of keep informed via their media, including Doherty Earth Observatory, US and Bernd Announcements PAGES news from 1993. A reprint is includ- a newsletter and a blog. Our current um- Zolitschka from the University of Bremen, ed in this issue as an insert (it was much brella program IGBP has decided to sunset Germany. Among other things, they are smaller then). by the end of 2015. The PAGES SSC has de- working alongside PAGES staff to edit up- cided that over the next two years PAGES coming editions of PAGES news. You can Communications update should join the Future Earth network, while learn more about our Guest Scientists and PAGES has now joined the Twitter-sphere. at the same time continuing to collaborate the work they are doing on the PAGES web- Follow us to get all the latest news: with other organizations. site > People > Guest Scientists. @PAGES_IPO. You can also subscribe to our new YouTube channel: Past Global IGBP Scientific Committee in Bern Introducing the new mini section Changes, and of course, we’ve still got the In April, PAGES, together with ProClim We hope you enjoy our first Science Facebook fan page: PAGES Past Global and the Oeschger Centre, hosted the IGBP Highlights mini section; in this issue it fo- Changes. Scientific Committee Meeting in Bern. IGBP cuses on Data Assimilation. The new mini SC members came together from around section format will feature 4-5 articles Staff update the globe to discuss potential synthesis focusing on a specific topic, and might Welcome to our two new staff mem- projects, IGBP’s legacy and how best to appear more regularly in future issues de- bers: Nicole Wegmüller (Finance and transition into the new integrated Future pending on demand. Office Manager) and Leonie Goodwin Earth super-program in the coming years. (Communications and Project Officer). Upcoming newsletters Support for meetings The next two issues of PAGES news will fo- PAGES OSM and YSM During its meeting in June, the PAGES SSC cus on dust and on annual recorders of the The Open Science and Young Scientists granted support for a total of ten scientific past. While the dust issue is already closed, Meetings continue to resonate. We re- and educational meetings. The next dead- suitable articles for the annual record- cently uploaded videos of seven plenary line for applying for PAGES meeting sup- ers issue are still welcome. Contributions talks with the accompanying PowerPoint port is 20 September 2013. Support can should explore the question of how natu- slides and some short video montages to be sought for workshop-style meetings ral archives with annual resolution are ap- our YouTube channel: Past Global Changes. relevant to PAGES Foci and Cross-Cutting proaching the temporal resolution of in- You can also read reports on the YSM activi- Themes. The three eligible categories are strumental records. Submissions should be ties written by the participants, starting on PAGES Working Group meetings, work- discussed with Bernd Zolitschka (zoli@uni- page 89. shops with a training or education focus, bremen.de) and be submitted before the and an open call for other workshops that 15th of September. As always, you are invit- PAGES umbrella programs are relevant to PAGES science. Application ed to submit Science Highlights, Program The transformation of the landscape of guidelines and forms can be found on the News, and Workshop Reports for the Open Global Environmental Change programs PAGES website > My PAGES > Meeting Section of PAGES news. Author guidelines is taking shape. The new Future Earth Support. can be found on the PAGES website > My program has now established a Scientific PAGES > Newsletter. New on the PAGES Bookshelf Tracking Environmental Change Using Lake Sediments, Volume 5 Data Handling and Numerical Techniques Editors: H. John B. Birks, André F. Lotter, Steve Juggins, John P. Smol Springer, 2012 Another volume in the “Development in Paleoenvironmental Research Series”, this book is the first of its type to cover the full range of modern data-analytical and statistical techniques used in paleolimnology and paleoecology. It features numerical and statistical techniques, such as exploratory data analysis, error estimation, clustering, ordination and modern statistical learning techniques. It also includes case studies on human impact, lake development and climate change. 46 PAGES news • Vol 21 • No 2 • August 2013 20 years of PAGES news Annoucements Annoucements Figure 1: Paleobibliographic analysis of PAGES news. he four-page insert included in this between the number of pages and the conditions and for creating predictive cli- Tissue is a copy of the first ever PAGES number of science highlights articles (r2= matic models. Paleoclimatic and paleoen- news created 20 years ago in Spring 1993. 0.92; P<0.01), with early issues usually con- vironmental data have the unique ability We thought this milestone provided an taining one article and more recent issues to provide detailed insights into ecosys- opportunity to reflect on how far PAGES 15±2. If this trend continues over the next tem responses to climate change at differ- news has come in that time, but also how 20 years, PAGES news will be a daunting ent time scales, which can inform future many of the issues discussed in our first 100 pages thick and feature 35 articles by policymaking. newsletter still remain pertinent today. the year 2033! We hope you enjoy a little trip back A quantitative paleobibliographic Hans Oeschger, the first chair of in time via our first issue. And for anyone analysis reveals the steady growth of PAGES, observed in his introduction to the thinking about replying to the Call for Title PAGES news in the last 20 years. We found first issue that global change research is Suggestions advertisement on the last evidence of five distinct stylistic eras and advancing at a remarkable pace, and many page: Although we have happily stuck to observed that the number of pages in of the issues he highlighted back in 1993 the “unimaginative title” PAGES news for each issue has increased 12-fold from four are still relevant today. An improved un- 20 years, we are, of course, still open to in 1993 to around 50 in current issues (Fig. derstanding of past global change is cru- your suggestions for improvement. 1). Likewise there is a strong correlation cial for evaluating present environmental PAGES Calendar Paleofire data synthesis using R Ramsar Wetlands: Ecological Character 02 - 06 Oct 2013 - Besançon, France 06 - 08 Nov 2013 - Queenscliff, Australia Holocene Circum-Arctic Peatland Carbon Dynamics PMIP Ocean Workshop 2013 12 - 16 Oct 2013 - Bethlehem, USA 04 - 06 Dec 2013 - Corvallis, USA PALSEA 2013 Workshop Age Models, Chronologies, and Databases 21 - 24 Oct 2013 - Rome, Italy 13 - 16 Jan 2014 - Belfast, Northern Ireland Joint PAGES 2k & PAST2k-PMIP Workshop PAGES Focus 4 workshop 04 - 06 Nov 2013 - Madrid, Spain 03 - 07 Feb 2014 - Leuven, Belgium www.pages-igbp.org/calendar/upcoming 47 PAGES news • Vol 21 • No 2 • August 2013 Editorial: El Niño-Southern Oscillation - observations and modeling PASCALE BRACONNOT1, C. BRIERLEY2 AND S.P. HARRISON3,4 1Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, unité mixte CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Saclay, France; [email protected] 2Department of Geography, University College London, UK; 3Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, North Ryde, Australia; 4Centre for Past Climate Change and School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Reading, UK he El Niño-Southern Oscillation same climate models used for future be regarded as a basis for future ENSO T(ENSO) is one of the major climate climate projections offer new opportu- research. Individual contributions Science Highlights: Editorial Highlights: Editorial Science phenomena affecting our global en- nities for improving our understanding address how one can extract ENSO- vironment (Figs. 1 and 2), but current of ENSO. One of the foci of the work- relevant climate information from tree understanding of ENSO is limited. ing group on climate variability in the rings, corals, giant bivalves, or shells, Instrumental records are too short to 3rd phase of the Paleoclimate Modeling and how modeling can be used to test allow us to document its spectrum of Intercomparison Project (PMIP3; explicit hypotheses to improve the in- variability and there is little knowledge Braconnot et al. 2012a) is to foster the terpretation of paleoclimate records of how variability alters with changes synthesis of high-resolution data and as well as to infer the mechanisms of in the climate mean state, for example the development of new data-model climate change. The articles also il- with anticipated global warming. comparison methodologies to exam- lustrate some fundamental questions In the PAGES news issue “Paired ine changes in ENSO. that need to be addressed in preparing perspectives on global climate change” multi-proxy reconstructions of past (2012), Amy Clement highlighted some The future of ENSO research ENSO behavior and in analyzing paleo- important issues about the decadal The suite of papers presented in this climate modeling results.