The meeting will take place next September 22nd–24th, 2010 in Lisbon, Portugal.
The symposium seeks to achieve a better understanding of regional and global climatic and environmental dynamics of the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ (MWP) – also referred to as Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) – through comparison of reconstructions and model simulations. It is expected to contribute towards homogeneous assimilation and evaluation of climate reconstructions, a better understanding of past modes of climate variability and their teleconnections with special focus on the MCA/MWP.


We propose to revisit the MCA/MWP assimilating widespread and continuous paleoclimatic evidence in a homogeneous way and scale them against recent measured temperatures to allow a meaningful quantitative comparison against the 20th-century pace and magnitude of warming. It is the goal of the organizers to focus attention on this topic, so that the latest results will be considered in the next (fifth) assessment report of the IPCC.


[Annual mean NH temperature anomalies from their 1500 to 1899 means (°C) simulated by different models (lines) and compared with the concentration of overlapping NH temperature reconstructions (grey shading). Taken from Figure 6.13 of Jansen et al., 2007: Palaeoclimate. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon et al. (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.]

Please, download a brochure of the symposium by clicking here.

 
Among the topics to be discussed are:

• Reconciling multiple proxy climate records—what do the differences indicate regarding the scale of MCA/MWP climate?

• What do the latest modeling results tell us about possible forcing mechanisms during this period?

• What are some other impacts of climatic variability during the MCA/MWP regarding such topics as changes in ocean basin tropical cyclone activity?

• What were some of the key regional patterns of climatic anomalies during this time? How do they compare with 20th century patterns?

• In what specific ways does the post-1980 period, considered a time when the global warming signal is evident, different from the largest anomalous multidecadal periods of the MCA/MWP?
 
Symposium: The Medieval Warm Period Redux - Where and when was it warm?
22‐24 September 2010 Lisbon, Portugal
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