Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 11 results of model data with Community Climate System Model version 3 including the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (CCSM3-DGVM) in NetCDF format at global and regional scale

The climate of Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 11, the interglacial roughly 400,000 years ago, is investigated for four time slices, 416, 410, 400, and 394 ka. The overall picture is that MIS 11 was a relatively warm interglacial in comparison to preindustrial, with Northern Hemisphere (NH) summer temperatures early in MIS 11 (416-410 ka) warmer than preindustrial, though winters were cooler. Later in MIS 11, especially around 400 ka, conditions were cooler in the NH summer, mainly in the high latitudes. Climate changes simulated by the models were mainly driven by insolation changes, with the exception of two local feedbacks that amplify climate changes. Here, the NH high latitudes, where reductions in sea ice cover lead to a winter warming early in MIS 11, as well as the tropics, where monsoon changes lead to stronger climate variations than one would expect on the basis of latitudinal mean insolation change alone, are especially prominent. The results support a northward expansion of trees at the expense of grasses in the high northern latitudes early during MIS 11, especially in northern Asia and North America.

Global and Regional Sea level budget components from GRACE and radar altimetry (2002-2014)

This dataset contains the result of a joint least squares inversion of GRACE and altimetry data. The results are evaluated in terms of sea level change for the global ocean as well as dedicated areas. In addition, some auxiliary data is provided to enable reproducibility of the results in Rietbroek et al. 2016, and a google Earth kmz file is provided which visualizes the trends derived from the inversion results.

Sea ice thickness from airborne electromagnetic (EM) induction sounding acquired from fixed-wing aircraft POLAR 5 surveys from several airports in Spitsbergen, Greenland, Canada and Alaska

While summer Arctic sea-ice extent has decreased over the past three decades, it is subject to large interannual and regional variations. Methodological challenges in measuring ice thickness continue to hamper our understanding of the response of the ice-thickness distribution to recent change, limiting the ability to forecast sea-ice change over the next decade. We present results from a 2400 km long pan-Arctic airborne electromagnetic (EM) ice thickness survey in April 2009, the first-ever large-scale EM thickness dataset obtained by fixed-wing aircraft over key regions of old ice in the Arctic Ocean between Svalbard and Alaska. The data provide detailed insight into ice thickness distributions characteristic for the different regions. Comparison with previous EM surveys shows that modal thicknesses of old ice had changed little since 2007, and remained within the expected range of natural variability.