The SPECIAL group has a long history of working with scientists from the Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología in Zaragoza, first through the DINAMO3 project and now through the wonderfully named…Read More >
SPECIAL Blog
Blog of the SPECIAL team members
A framework for new analyses of lake status data by Sandy Harrison
The Global Lake Status Database (GLSDB) has been widely used by the climate modelling community to evaluate model predictions of changing hydroclimate, most particularly changes in the monsoon regions in…Read More >
An improved statistical approach for reconstructing past climates from biotic assemblages. By Mengmeng Liu
How to know the climates at the remote past? Unfortunately, we don’t have a time machine to go back and measure them. We have to infer them from some indicators….Read More >
The SPECIAL presence at the PMIP2020 meeting
The Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison project (PMIP; https://pmip.lsce.ipsl.fr/), which began in the early 1990s to provide an efficient mechanism for coordinating palaeoclimate modelling activities, held it’s biannual meeting in Nanjing (China)…Read More >
What are the drivers of regional-scale speleothem oxygen isotope trends? By Sarah Parker
The first paper of my PhD, “A data-model approach to interpreting speleothem oxygen isotope records from monsoon regions on orbital timescales”, is available online at Climate of the Past Discussions…Read More >
Benchmarking is a necessary evil. By Sandy Harrison
The FireMIP paper describing the benchmarking of fire-enabled vegetation model simulations of the historic period is now out in Geoscientific Model Development (https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-3299-2020). The team, led by Stijn Hantson, have…Read More >
Virtual visit to the Tsinghua Tiger Team. By Sandy Harrison
This month I have been in Tsinghua virtually, working on a daily basis with the team in Earth Sciences: Han Wang, Huiying Xu, Shengchao Qiao, Yanghan Ren, Ziqi Zhu and…Read More >
The impact of methodological decisions on climate reconstructions using WA-PLS. By Mark Turner
Finally… long in the making, my “method” paper is out in Quaternary Research http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/qua.2020.44 today. It could not have been completed without a great deal of help from my co-authors…Read More >
World Without Fire: Another FireMIP paper is out! By Sandy Harrison
The paper “Global ecosystems and fire: a multi-model assessment of fire-induced tree cover and carbon storage reduction” (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.15160), led by Gitta Lasslop (Senckenberg: https://www.senckenberg.de/en/institutes/sbik-f/biodiversity-and-ecosystem-services/team-biodiversitaet-und-oekosystemdienstleistungen-im-erdsystem/) has come out today. This paper…Read More >
Slow train coming. By Sandy Harrison
I am very glad that our paper “Organising principles for vegetation dynamics” was published today in Nature Plants (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-020-0655-x). This perspective paper explores new approaches to modelling the terrestrial biosphere…Read More >
