final_program_abstracts[1]

11 IMSC Session Program
Paleoclimate extremes in proxy data
Tuesday - Parallel Session 3
Elizabeth Mannshardt-Shamseldin, Peter Craigmile and Martin Tingley
There is often interest in determining which year in a proxy reconstruction was
warmest, coldest, or otherwise extreme. For example, using proxy data to address
questions such as “Were the 1990s the warmest decade of the last millennium?”, “Is
there evidence that the extreme events of recent decades are more extreme than
previous decades?” The methodology of extreme value theory has not been widely
applied to this problem. What can the statistics of extremes offer? Are there temporal
trends among the extreme temperature values in proxy data? What can be learned by
examining the behavior of the extreme value distributions for proxies themselves
versus those for reconstructions and observed data? There is also interest in
determining how these reconstructions compare to the observed climate. This leads to
possible calibration with climate model output, with models run under different
greenhouse gas assumptions.
Abstracts 133