date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 14:41:07 +0100
from: Keith Alverson <keith.alverson@pages.unibe.ch>
subject: workshop invitation
to: keith.alverson@pages.unibe.ch

WORKSHOP INVITATION

We are writing to invite your participation in a "PAGES-CLIVAR Workshop on
Climate Variations of the Last 300 to 1000 Years", to be held in Venice,
Italy, November 8-12, 1999. The workshop sponsors include the EC, the US
PAGES/CLIVAR Program, IGBP PAGES, WCRP CLIVAR and CNR-ISDGM in Venice.

The goals of the workshop are
1) to review recent work, 2) to produce a new state-of-the-art analysis of
recent paleoclimate for possible publication in Science or Nature and use
by the IPCC, and 3) to produce updated implementation strategies for the
PAGES/CLIVAR program.

The scientific foci of the meeting will be:

 o the comparison the different proxy-data records (e.g., coral, ice core,
tree ring, sediment, historical documentary, etc. ) to recognize their
common messages and differences; to assess recent paleoclimatic change on
regional (e.g., tropical Pacific, North Atlantic) to hemispheric scales,
 o the evaluation of several recently produced continental to
hemispheric-scale surface temperature reconstructions (e.g., Overpeck et
al., 1997; Mann et al., 1998; Jones, 1998; Briffa et al., 1998), and to
possibly update/combine these to provide a new state-of-the-art
reconstruction of climate variability for the last 300-600 years,
 o the comparison and integration of all available paleoclimate data for
the last 1000 years to put the anomalously warm 20th century in the context
of possible past warm periods (e.g., the Medieval Warm Period), and to
determine if the 20th century warmth is truly unprecedented or not,
 o the comparison of new reconstructions of hypothesized climate forcing
(e.g., volcanic, solar, trace gas, aerosol) over the last 300-1000 years,
and to compare these forcing time series with reconstructed climate
variability to test the possible roles of each forcing
 o the interaction with the CLIVAR/modelling community to establish a
strategy to make the best use of the proxy-data to determine the natural
variability of the climate system, validate model simulations and provide
an improved database to help detect/attribute  man-made climatic change
during the present century,
 o the generation of reconstructions required by modellers to initialize
coupled ocean-atmosphere model simulations of the last 150 years - the
transient experiments from the end of the pre-industrial period needed  to
study the impact of greenhouse gas and aerosol concentration increases,
 o the evaluation of whether the various on-going research projects, when
completed, will provide enough information to generate needed improvements
to our understanding of global climate variability over the last 300 to
1000 years,
 o the identification of gaps in current research programs and the
establishment of strategies to fill them,

 The meeting will be run in three parts:

 - prior to the meeting, participants will be asked to put all available
paleoclimate reconstructions and data in a protected Internet location for
sharing and intercomparison with all other data to be presented and used at
the meeting; all except unpublished data will be made public after the
meeting along with new reconstructions generated at the meeting,

 - the first part of the meeting ( two days) will be devoted to the
presentation of new original results generated during the last few years,

- the participants will then split in working groups to address the
specific objectives as defined above.

The first purpose of this letter is to get the workshop on your calendar,
and get you thinking about the opportunities the gathering will provide,
both in terms of the best global array of data (climate and climate
forcing)yet assembled for the last 300 to 1000 years, as well as with
respect to a truly interdisciplinary gathering of PAGES and CLIVAR
scientists.

The second purpose of this letter is to ask if you think you can attend or
not. Please send an email by April 5th to Keith Alverson
(alverson@pages.unibe.ch) to indicate your willingness to attend or not.
Funding for this workshop is limited, therefore it would be greatly
appreciated if you can make every effort to cover some of your costs from
your own sources. Please include in your email a statement as to whether
you will require full, partial or zero funding to attend as well as an
estimate of your travel costs (roundtrip to Venice). This information will
greatly help in the early budgeting for this workshop.

A list of invited participants is attached for your reference.

We're looking forward to a ground-breaking workshop. Thanks!

Sincerely,


Jean-Claude Duplessy
Jonathan Overpeck
(Co-Chairs, PAGES-CLIVAR Working Group)

Invited Participants List:

Bard		France		coral
Charles		USA		coral
Cole		USA		coral
Gagan		Australia	coral
Juillet-Leclerc	France	coral
Quinn		USA		coral
Tudhope		UK		coral

Boninsegna	ARG	tree ring
Briffa		UK	tree ring
Cook		USA	tree ring
Hughes		USA	tree ring
Jones		UK	tree ring
Schweingruber	CH	tree ring

Johnsen		DK	ice core
Jouzel		FR	ice core
Mosely-Thompson	USA	ice core
Thompson	USA	ice core
White		USA	ice core

Duplessy	FR	sediments
Jansen		Norway	sediments
Keigwin		USA	sediments
Overpeck	USA	sediments

Bradley		USA	historical
Diaz		USA	historical
Pfister		CH	historical

Beer		CH	forcings
Raynaud		FR	forcings
Lean		USA	forcings
Zielinski	USA	forcings

Abe-Ouchi 	Japan	General
Battisti	USA	General
Bengtsson	G	General
Berger		B	General
Cane		USA	General
Crowley		USA	General
Joussaume	FR	General
Komen		NL	General
Manabe		Japan	General
Mitchell	UK	General
Rahmstorf	G	General
Rind		USA	General
Sarachik	USA	General
Stocker		CH	General
Trenberth	USA	General
Webster		USA	General

Alverson	CH	PAGES IPO
Zimmerman	USA	NSF
Coleman		USA	NSF
Mooney		USA	NOAA


______________________________________________________________________________
Keith Alverson, Science Officer         e-mail: alverson@pages.unibe.ch
PAGES International Project Office      Phone: +41 31 312 3133
Brenplatz 2,  CH-3011                  Fax: +41 31 312 3168
Bern, Switzerland                       Internet: http://www.pages.unibe.ch/
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