Model simulation output data (CCSM3) related to uplift of Africa and Himalaya/Tibet Plateau and the influence on tropical African vegetation

Hominid evolution in the late Miocene has long been hypothesized to be linked to the retreat of the tropical rainforest in Africa. One cause for the climatic and vegetation change often considered was uplift of Africa, but also uplift of the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau was suggested to have impacted rainfall distribution over Africa. Recent proxy data suggest that in East Africa open grassland habitats were available to the common ancestors of hominins and apes long before their divergence and do not find evidence for a closed rainforest in the late Miocene. We used the coupled global general circulation model CCSM3 including an interactively coupled dynamic vegetation module to investigate the impact of topography on African hydro-climate and vegetation. We performed sensitivity experiments altering elevations of the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau as well as of East and Southern Africa. The simulations confirm the dominant impact of African topography for climate and vegetation development of the African tropics. Only a weak influence of prescribed Asian uplift on African climate could be detected. The model simulations show that rainforest coverage of Central Africa is strongly determined by the presence of elevated African topography. In East Africa, despite wetter conditions with lowered African topography, the conditions were not favorable enough to maintain a closed rainforest. A discussion of the results with respect to other model studies indicates a minor importance of vegetation-atmosphere or ocean-atmosphere feedbacks and a large dependence of the simulated vegetation response on the land surface/vegetation model.

Real-time surface current data in the Ibiza Channel from January to October 2016

The data set consists of maps of total velocity of surface currents in the Ibiza Channel, derived from HF radar measurements.

Model results of ocean physical field of the reference state and the targets in NetCDF format

In a feasibility study, the potential of proxy data for the temperature and salinity during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, about 19 000 to 23 000 years before present) in constraining the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) with a general ocean circulation model was explored. The proxy data were simulated by drawing data from four different model simulations at the ocean sediment core locations of the Multiproxy Approach for the Reconstruction of the Glacial Ocean surface (MARGO) project, and perturbing these data with realistic noise estimates. The results suggest that our method has the potential to provide estimates of the past strength of the AMOC even from sparse data, but in general, paleo-sea-surface temperature data without additional prior knowledge about the ocean state during the LGM is not adequate to constrain the model. On the one hand, additional data in the deep-ocean and salinity data are shown to be highly important in estimating the LGM circulation. On the other hand, increasing the amount of surface data alone does not appear to be enough for better estimates. Finally, better initial guesses to start the state estimation procedure would greatly improve the performance of the method. Indeed, with a sufficiently good first guess, just the sea-surface temperature data from the MARGO project promise to be sufficient for reliable estimates of the strength of the AMOC.

The Austrian Glacier Inventories GI 1 (1969), GI 2 (1998), GI 3 (2006), and GI LIA in ArcGIS (shapefile) format

Glacier inventories provide the basis for further studies on mass balance and volume change, relevant for local hydrological issues as well as for global calculation of sea level rise. In this study, a new Austrian glacier inventory has been compiled, updating data from 1969 (GI 1) and 1998 (GI 2) based on high-resolution lidar digital elevation models (DEMs) and orthophotos dating from 2004 to 2012 (GI 3). To expand the time series of digital glacier inventories in the past, the glacier outlines of the Little Ice Age maximum state (LIA) have been digitalized based on the lidar DEM and orthophotos. The resulting glacier area for GI 3 of 415.11 ± 11.18 km**2 is 44% of the LIA area. The annual relative area losses are 0.3%/yr for the ~119-year period GI LIA to GI 1 with one period with major glacier advances in the 1920s. From GI 1 to GI 2 (29 years, one advance period of variable length in the 1980s) glacier area decreased by 0.6% yr?1 and from GI 2 to GI 3 (10 years, no advance period) by 1.2%/yr. Regional variability of the annual relative area loss is highest in the latest period, ranging from 0.3 to 6.19%/yr. The mean glacier size decreased from 0.69 km**2 (GI 1) to 0.46 km**2 (GI 3), with 47% of the glaciers being smaller than 0.1 km**2 in GI 3 (22%).

Two historical maps from nineteenth-century Palestine, with links to digitized maps in shapefile format

Reconstructing past landscapes from historical maps requires quantifying the accuracy and completeness of these sources. The accuracy and completeness of two historical maps of the same period covering the same area in Israel were examined: the 1:63,360 British Palestine Exploration Fund map (1871-1877) and the 1:100,000 French Levés en Galilée (LG) map (1870). These maps cover the mountainous area of the Galilee (northern Israel), a region with significant natural and topographical diversity, and a long history of human presence. Land-cover features from both maps, as well as the contours drawn on the LG map, were digitized. The overall correspondence between land-cover features shown on both maps was 59% and we found that the geo-referencing method employed (transformation type and source of control points) did not significantly affect these correspondence measures. Both maps show that in the 1870s, 35% of the Galilee was covered by Mediterranean maquis, with less than 8% of the area used for permanent agricultural cropland (e.g., plantations). This article presents how the reliability of the maps was assessed by using two spatial historical sources, and how land-cover classes that were mapped with lower certainty and completeness are identified. Some of the causes that led to observed differences between the maps, including mapping scale, time of year, and the interests of the surveyors, are also identified.

High resolution bathymetric compilation for Potter Cove, WAP, Antarctica, with links to data in ArcGIS format

The bathymetry raster with a resolution of 5 m x 5 m was processed from unpublished single beam data from the Argentine Antarctica Institute (IAA, 2010) and multibeam data from the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO, 2012) with a cell size of 5 m x 5 m. A coastline digitized from a satellite image (DigitalGlobe, 2014) supplemented the interpolation process. The 'Topo to Raster' tool in ArcMap 10.3 was used to merge the three data sets, while the coastline represented the 0-m-contour to the interpolation process ('contour type option').