I have been working virtually with the Tsinghua team (Han Wang, Huiying Xu, Shengchao Qiao, Yanghan Ren, Ziqi Zhu, and Colin Prentice) for the last 14 days. We focused particularly on…Read More >
SPECIAL Blog
Blog of the SPECIAL team members
Investigating fundamental wildfire drivers by Alexander Kuhn-Regnier
My PhD began by asking the question “What are the fundamental drivers of wildfires?” Far from being the first to ask it, I searched for an aspect of this question…Read More >
The SPECIAL presence at the EGU General Assembly 2021 by Yicheng Shen
The annual EGU General Assembly is Europe’s largest and most prominent geosciences event. The General Assembly also features a job centre, artists-in-residence, and a newsletter, EGU Today, which highlights sessions,…Read More >
Classifying Land Use Practices in the Holocene by Sandy Harrison
The possibility that people had a significant effect on global climate in the pre-industrial era is still a matter for debate. The introduction and spread of agriculture during the Neolithic…Read More >
Reconstructing long-term climate change in Spain by Sandy Harrison
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 >
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 >
