Abstract. The relative role of external forcing and intrinsic variability is a key question climate in general our planet's paleoclimatic past particular. Over the last 100 years since Milankovic's contributions, importance orbital has been established for period covering 2.6 Myr Quaternary glaciation cycles that took place during time. A convincing case also made several internal mechanisms ar...

Forest ecosystems in eastern Canada are particularly sensitive to climate change and may shift from carbon sinks to carbon sources in the coming decades. Understanding how forest biomass responded to past climate change is thus of crucial interest, but past biomass reconstruction still represents a challenge. Here we used transfer functions based on modern pollen assemblages and remotely sensed...

For millions of years, glaciers have been a permanent feature on Earth’s surface. The climate has cycled through relatively warm periods, such as we are experiencing now with glaciers confined mostly to Antarctica and Greenland, to relatively cold periods with vast ice sheets extending over the continents. The Sun provides the energy powering the Earth’s weather and climate. The incoming solar ...

Abstract Topoclimatic models use topographic descriptors (elevation, slope, aspect, landscape position...) as primary input to build climatic surfaces that describe spatial and temporal patterns of such physical factors as temperature, incoming solar radiation (insolation), precipitation, soil moisture, and evapotranspiration. Topoclimatic habitat models translate these physical factors into in...

Layered deposits of dusty ice in the martian polar caps have been hypothesized to record climate changes driven by orbitally induced variations in the distribution of incoming solar radiation. Attempts to identify such an orbital signal by tuning a stratigraphic sequence of polar layered deposits (PLDs) to match an assumed forcing introduce a risk of identifying spurious matches between unrelat...