Quantitative reconstruction of mid- to late-Holocene climate in NE China from peat cellulose stable oxygen and carbon isotope records and mechanistic models

Abstract

There has been an increasing need to reconstruct past climate from proxy records quantitatively and mechanistically. The inverse proxy modeling method stands out as a novel approach to quantitative palaeoclimate reconstructions through integrating process-based models and proxy records, representing a major progress in quantitative palaeoclimatology. It has been proposed to incorporate multiple proxy records to produce a more robust constraint on the climate parameters sought for estimation, and most of the work has been conducted using pollen records in conjunction with vegetation models. Here, I show a worked example of using paired stable oxygen and carbon isotope records of peat cellulose from one single core to infer the climate history in NE China for the last 6000 years through solving a well-posed inverse problem using Bayesian statistics. The quantitative palaeoclimate data obtained in this study may deepen our insight into the dynamics of the East Asian summer monsoon. Mean growing season temperature and relative humidity show millennial-scale fluctuations prior to c. 4000 cal. yr BP; thereafter, centennial-scale fluctuations prevailed, revealing the relative importance of solar activity over tropical ocean–atmosphere interactions in regulating the variability of regional climate during the late Holocene. It appears that there was a prominent out-of-phase relationship between temperature and relative humidity, due probably to the different response of these climate elements to orbital forcing and land cover. This worked example demonstrates the potential of using model–data fusion techniques to produce physically meaningful, mathematically optimal, and geologically sound results.