cc: "Michael E. Mann" , rbradley@geo.umass.edu, jto@u.arizona.edu, storch@gkss.de, weber@knmi.nl, wanner@giub.unibe.ch, tom crowley , k.briffa@uea.ac.uk date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 13:29:32 -0400 from: "Michael E. Mann" subject: Re: workshop report to: Julia Cole Dear Julie, Thanks for your comments. They are helpful, and well taken. I'm not sure we can accommodate significant discussion of *all* of the issues you mention, because of limited space and a need to discuss a wide range of things. But we can certainly tweak the emphasis and reorganize the discussion as you recommend. Lets wait for the comments from the others. At that point, may I request (if you are willing) that you and Malcolm work on a revised draft that incorporates your comments, Malcolm's additions, and the concerns/suggestions expressed by the others, as you hinted you might be willing to do? I'll probably want to take one more crack at finalizing it after you are done, then we can send it out one last time to the group for final comments. Please let me know if you are amenable to this. Thanks, mike At 09:22 AM 6/15/01 -0700, Julia Cole wrote: Hi Mike, Just finished the draft report and overall, it looks like a great start. I want to make a few comments though, which I hope are not too odious to implement. Please let me know if you want actual rewriting from me.... I'm guessing you'll need to do it yourself to incorporate everyone's input, however. In general, I think shorter paragraphs would be better and I have tried to break these up in my comments. Remember that EOS columns are narrow, and a paragraph that is a half page here will be really long in EOS! In para 1, second line, I think you mean "natural variability of the modern and near-future climate"; obviously the natural variability of climate over all time scales exceeds that of the late Holocene. Where you cite Crowley, you might also want to cite a GCM-based analysis (Rind et al 1999 JGR, or Robertson et al. if Peck says its citable - these refs are below). More philosophically - the initial two paragraphs are focused on one way of looking at climate - the large-scale (hemispheric/global) reconstruction of temperature and explaining that variability. We spent a couple days of workshop on regional reconstruction targeting ENSO, NAO, hydrologic variability on different continents, etc., but that doesn't appear until several paragraphs later. Your "three distinct approaches" really needs to come under a later header of large-scale temperature reconstruction, and before this is introduced, the issue of regional reconstructions needs to be mentioned. You can break up the first two paras into shorter units if you do this. Can you create headers to break up the article? Begnning of third para - I think you might specify that you are referring again to discrepancies in large-scale T reconstructions... In third and fifth paragraphs, you seem to imply that borehole records are not "proxy-based" records. But borehole data are proxies for surface air temperature, are they not? I think this subtle distinction will be lost on many, which will obscure your meaning. Maybe better to distinguish "multiproxy", "tree-ring", and "borehole" reconstructions for more clarity. Final para: first, I think you can make this three paras with minimal rewriting - one on data gaps, one on need for low-res records, and one on validation. Third line - when you say database, it sound like we need better organization of the data we have - but what we really need I think is more and better data. We should state this more clearly in that sentence - you go on to say what's needed, so I think this is what you mean too. Third sentence - eliminate "(particularly the extratropics)" - it contradicts your first clause in that sentence; you can also eliminate "related" since what we need are proxies of ENSO variability. 4th sentence - "climatically key" for what? Lets just say "data sparse". Instead of "currently emphasized high resolution", how about just "annual". Later on, there's that borehole vs proxy distinction again that can be clarified. We did also identify the nineteenth century as an interesting interval for reconstruction - one that is uncontaminated by anthropogenic forcing, for the most part. That is nowhere in here. There are interesting changes in ENSO (Urban et al) and the NAO (Heinz and Jurg told me about this - perhaps it is in the NAO review paper) whose impacts would be really interesting to decipher. That's it for specific changes - I can see a few places where the number of words can be reduced w/o changing meaning, and if you want me to go through that later, I'd be happy to - but without getting everyone else's input first, it might be a waste of time to try it now. cheers, Julie Rind, D., J. Lean, and R. Healy, Simulated time-dependent climate response to solar radiative forcing since 1600, Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, 104 (D2), 1973-1990, 1999. Robertson, A.D., J.T. Overpeck, D. Rind, and R. Healy, Simulated and observed climate variability of the last 500 years, Science, to be submitted June 2001, 2001. __________________________________ Dr. Julia Cole Dept. of Geosciences Gould-Simpson Bldg. 1040 E. 4th St. University of Arizona Tucson AZ 85721 phone 520-626-2341 fax 520-621-2672 __________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ 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 [1]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.[2]shtml