We often hear that a particular season has been the warmest or wettest on record. These temperature and precipitation records are for the instrumental period of record that extends back little more than 150 years, a relatively short time interval in Earth's history.
Earth scientists from various fields have extended our view of Earth's past climates farther back into the past through a variety of proxy indicators. One place where information about paleoclimatology, or the study of past climates, can be found is at the website maintained by NOAA Paleoclimatology, a branch of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Data sets produced by paleoclimatologists from proxy records are archived in the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology. Interested parties may obtain these data sets, which are catalogued variously by investigator, data type or locale.
Spend some time looking at variety of topics available. For example, go to Paleo Perspectives and browse through the four topics: Abrupt Climate Change: A Paleo Perspective, A Paleo Perspective on Global Warming and Colorado River Stream Flow: A Paleo Perspective. By this point in the course, you be familiar with some of these topics.
You may also wish to go to the Education and Outreach page where you can view a variety of paleoclimatology slide sets prepared by experts in paleoclimatology, such as the Resource Page on Tree Rings, or Coral Paleoclimatology.
Return to ECS RealTime Climate Portal
Prepared by Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@aos.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2018, The American Meteorological Society.