Scientific Theme: Advanced Modeling and Observing Systems

Theme report: Climate System Variability
ACCOMPLISHMENTS FOR PSD04.3:
The coupled ocean-atmosphere response to Indian Ocean warmth was studied. It was shown with atmospheric
models that Indian Ocean warmth forces a positive polarity phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO),
confirming results of previous studies. Coupled model experiments showed that this NAO response forces a local
air-sea feedback over the North Atlantic Ocean, which intensifies the NAO response. This enhancement is realized
through a positive feedback between the NAO atmospheric circulation anomaly and a tripolar North Atlantic SST
pattern, consistent with other studies on North Atlantic air-sea interactions. It was concluded that the North Atlantic
and European climate response to Indian Ocean warming may be considerably greater than hitherto judged from
analyses of atmospheric model experiments alone.
NGDC04: Paleoclimatology—Understanding Decadal- to Millennial-Scale Climate Variability
GOAL:
Improve our understanding of observed long-term climate variations through compilation and analysis of data from
the pre-instrumental record and provide access to both data and information from the paleoclimatic record.
MILESTONE NGDC04.1:
Create a fire-history portal on the FRAMES (Fire Research and Management System) website.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS FOR NGDC04.1:
The goal of the Fire Research and Management System (FRAMES) program, which is supported by the U.S. Forest
Service and the U.S. Geological Survey‘s National Biological Information Infrastructure Program, in cooperation
with the College of Natural Resources at the University of Idaho, is to facilitate the exchange of information and
transfer of technology among wild-land fire researchers, land managers, and other stakeholders. To this end, they are
hosting a web portal that is organized into several functional Subject Areas, and CIRES-NOAA personnel have
taken over the role of content managers for the Fire-History Subject Area. Fire-history data are increasingly seen as
critical information for contemporary management of public lands by providing opportunities for understanding the
range of variability in fire frequency, severity, extent, and spatial complexity, as well as the role of fire in
ecosystems and the feedbacks that link fire, climate, vegetation, and management decisions. Fire-history data
provide managers with models of long-term ecosystem behavior with which to assess degree and nature of departure
in current conditions, and direction and justification for ecological restoration efforts, fuels treatments, and other
resource management projects. CIRES-NOAA personnel have created and maintained the portlets and web pages for
the FRAMES Fire History Subject Area, and in particular have made data from the International Multiproxy
Paleofire Database, which is an archive of fire history data derived from natural proxies that is housed at NOAA‘s
Paleoclimatology Branch and maintained by CIRES-NOAA personnel, available via text- and geographical-based
searches through the portal.
MILESTONE NGDC04.2:
Implement protocols that provide paleoclimate metadata to remote crawlers and harvesters,
including the PAGES and FRAMES portals.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS FOR NGDC04.2:
In an effort to improve data accessibility and ease of data browsing, the Paleoclimatology branch put the metadata
from data sets into a database. Collections of metadata XML were then produced from the database and those XML
files were then transformed into HTML web pages using XSLT code. An XSLT conversion was run on the XML
metadata records to produce data index pages for each proxy type with Title, Principal Investigators and Location
listed for each data set. The page has column headers that may be sorted for easier browsing. The XSLT also
produced an HTML page for every study in the collection, which are linked from the index listing page. One major
benefit of having individual web pages for each data set is that a web browser search engine text search on a data set
title, PI or core name will now turn up those individual studies from the data collection that previously required
visitors to be on the NOAA Paleoclimatology website to search for those sites. It opens up this data to the whole
world of Google-style searching without users having to know the web address first. The data set description HTML
pages also serve as the data description pages when users and partners such as FRAMES (Fire Research And
Management Exchange System) and PAGES (Past Global Changes) use the OAI-PMH metadata search tool to find
data sets.
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