cc: srutherford@virginia.edu, mann@virginia.edu
date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 10:11:30 -0400
from: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@multiproxy.evsc.virginia.edu>
subject: Re: my visit
to: Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk>

HI Tim,

Thanks for your message. Yes, the time is rapidly approaching indeed, but I
haven't forgotten.

I will put you up at the "Red Roof Inn" for the 10 nights. Its a nice
enough hotel, but most importantly its right in the heart of the U.Va
campus, and walkable to just about everything you'll need (even if you have
a car, will be nice to be in the center of things I think, and on-campus
parking is impossible, so being walking distance from our department will
help out alot).

Will have reservations made for you for the night of the 10th through 19th,
checking out morning of the 20th...

I'm cc'ing your message to Scott Rutherford (a research scientist working
w/ me at U.Va) who will be working closely w/ us. This will be important,
since I will be tied up w/ teaching responsibilities a good deal of the
time, but you and Scott should be able to make progress while I'm tied up.

You mention three very worthwhile topics.  Items I and II in your
list are worth doing, but they're a bit retrospective, particularly,
because we've moved on to a significantly revised methodology, which we're
in the testing stages with, and can show you some intriguing results from
(as we speak, Scott is writing them up). Scott isn't working w/ my old code
anymore so its become a bit of a relic. Would be preferable to do something
based on the revised methodology (which makes use of  regularization scheme
employing
a ridge regression technique, to avoid having to use a truncated EOF
basis approximation of the data covariance).

The topic of model/data comparison (iii) seems particularly worthwhile to me,
because it would build on current efforts we have w/ the GFDL group, and
efforts which you may have w/ the Hadley Centre crowd, etc?

Two specific possibilities are:

1) Development of appropriate synthetic "pseudo proxy" networks. These
would be derived from sparse gridpoints of model fields, and can be
constructed to have a variety of systematic biases, additive noise levels,
etc. which would be symptomatic of the perceived or established noise and
biases in different types of proxy data. Since the model fields and effects
of noise on the
faithfulness of "paleoclimate reconstructions" could be estimated directly
(be We are currently working w/ the GFDL model, but it would be wonderful
if we could come up w/ synthetic datasets (perhaps a few different ones
actually), which we might be generally happy enough that similar
experiments could be done w/ the Hadley Centre model, etc. This would be
very useful for comparison of methods, but would have very general
usefulness...

2) Development of a multi-stage wavelet-based regression method for
paleoclimate/instrumental calibration to calibrate different timescales of
variability distinctly. I think this has application both to the
"multiproxy" case and the tree-ring case. The idea is to only use those
proxies which have
a resonable level of power in a given frequency band, as predictors for
the reconstructions in that frequency band, and then sum the wavelet
reconstructions for a full reconstruction. Again, the idea would be to test
on model data before applying to proxy data...

Do either of these specific projects excite you? I think either would make
for a very nice ongoing collaboration, and would pave some interesting new
directions for the field too. 

Scott will be up in Rhode Island for the first few days of your visit, but
I'm hoping he can join us by Thursday October 12th.

Let me know what you think. 

Thanks,

mike

At 01:56 PM 9/19/00 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi Mike,
>
>Hope all's well with you.  My visit to Virginia is *rapidly* approaching,
>so arrangements (practical & non-work) need to be made.
>
>My air tickets have just arrived, here are the details:
>Tuesday 10th October: Depart Norwich 0620, Arrive Washington Dulles 1410.
>Friday 20th October: Depart Washington Dulles 1805, Arrive Norwich 0940(+1
>day).
>
>I shall pick up a hire car at Dulles and drive to Charlottesville (I'll
>keep the car for the duration).
>
>Have you been able to arrange accomodation for me (for the 10 nights)?
>Could you let me know details/directions etc.?  Cheers.
>
>I'll have about 7 and a half working days (I guess I'll have to leave
>around midday on Friday to get to Dulles by the check-in time), which
>should allow some useful work to be done.  I have some ideas about
>collaborative work that should prove useful, along the lines of (i)
>comparison of methods (perhaps using your reconstruction approach with our
>tree-ring-density-only data set, and comparing results with our
>spatial/regional reconstructions); (ii) comparison of your warm-season
>reconstructions with ours; (iii) development of methods for comparing model
>output with palaeoclimate reconstructions.  Before going into detail, do
>these appeal to you?  And do you have any additional or alternative
>suggestions?
>
>I'm looking forward to my visit - it should prove useful for us all I hope.
>
>Best regards
>
>Tim
>
>PS. I'm not sure how things are organised over there, but I'd be happy to
>present a seminar during my visit (on palaeo or non-palaeo topics).
>
>
>
>Dr Timothy J Osborn                 | phone:    +44 1603 592089
>Senior Research Associate           | fax:      +44 1603 507784
>Climatic Research Unit              | e-mail:   t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
>School of Environmental Sciences    | web-site: 
>University of East Anglia __________|   http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
>Norwich  NR4 7TJ         | sunclock:
>UK                       |   http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm
>
>
>
_______________________________________________________________________
                     Professor Michael E. Mann
          Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
                      University of Virginia
                     Charlottesville, VA 22903
_______________________________________________________________________
e-mail: mann@virginia.edu   Phone: (804) 924-7770   FAX: (804) 982-2137
       http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.html

