date: Mon Sep 8 10:40:58 2008 from: Tim Osborn subject: request extension for NERC final report to: Keith Briffa Please can we formally request a 2-month extension to the deadline for submission of the final report of our NERC (Rapid Climate Change) grant NER/T/S/2002/00440 "Quantitative applications of high-resolution late Holocene proxy data sets: estimating climate sensitivity and thermohaline circulation influences". The reason/justification for this request is that it would allow us to complete another suite of energy balance model simulations that we are currently undertaking in order to better apply a maximum likelihood approach for constraining climate model parameters based on comparison with pseudo-proxy and actual temperature reconstructions. We undertook related model simulations during spring 2008 but have subsequently decided that the analysis will benefit from additional model simulations. Tim Osborn and myself are currently making these runs but we envisage another month or so after which time we will need to analyse the results. We are very anxious to incorporate at least preliminary findings of these runs in the final project report. It is for this reason that we are requesting a 2-month extension.