Acta Geographica Sinica ›› 2015, Vol. 70 ›› Issue (3): 355-363.doi: 10.11821/dlxb201503001

• Orginal Article •     Next Articles

PAGES synthesis study on climate changes in Asia over the last 2000 years: Progresses and perspectives

Quansheng GE, Jingyun ZHENG, Zhixin HAO()   

  1. Key Laboratory of Land Surface Pattern and Simulation, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China
  • Received:2014-12-19 Revised:2015-02-06 Online:2015-03-20 Published:2015-03-20

Abstract:

The established background and goals of the last 2 millennia climate research network, past global changes (PAGES2K) were introduced, and the distinctive significance of Asia2k in PAGES project was expounded. The main research progresses from PAGES-Asia2k working group and contributions of China to the synthetic climate reconstructions of the last 2000 years were also addressed in this paper. In addition, we analyzed the challenge and key issues during the studies on climate reconstructions over Asia, and discussed the research activities in the future work. Asia is an ideal area to conduct synthesis studies on the climate changes for the past 2000 years due to its long history and abundant proxy types with a high time-resolution; however, at present, the related research work is still in its infancy. The recent progresses showed that during the past 1200 years there was a warmer period (830-1220), a colder period (1340-1880), and a rapid warming period (the 20th century). However, the climate of Asia is characterized by various types, complicated process changing and large regional differences. Thus, the future work of this project will focus on the following topics: developing the new methodologies for climate change reconstructions to improve the reliabilities of reconstructed results in individual sites (regions) and the temporal-spatial resolutions, data coverage for the whole continent; developing the PAGES-Asia2k proxy climate database for synthesis study to reconstruct the regional temperature series and spatial patterns of wet and dry changes; furthermore, studying the mechanism and impact of climate change and its adaptation at regional scale.

Key words: climate changes, synthesis study, the past 2000 years, Asia