Latest developments

  • New Publication from Mapping Ancient Africa INQUA project
    New Publication from Mapping Ancient Africa INQUA project

    We are pleased to share the latest contribution to the Mapping Ancient Africa Special Issue of Quaternary International. This study provides valuable insights into the past ecological and cultural dynamics at Wonderwerk Cave. New article:…

  • Podcast INQUA 2027 India
    Podcast INQUA 2027 India

    Quaternary is the age when modern recognisable humans started inhabiting this planet. All over the world scientists are engaged in studying various aspects of human evolution. Once every 4 years scientists from all across the…

  • Webinar Series: Climate of the Past 20th Anniversary!
    Webinar Series: Climate of the Past 20th Anniversary!

    Climate of the Past Celebrates 20 Years with Monthly Webinar Series The European Geosciences Union’s open-access, community-driven journal Climate of the Past (CP) is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2025! To mark the occasion, CP…

  • INQUA 2027 Talk Series
    INQUA 2027 Talk Series

    Join the next INQUA talk featuring “Late Quaternary human response to climate change in southern India” presented by Prof. Ravi Korisettar – NIAS Bengaluru, scheduled for Saturday, 31st May at 11:00 AM IST. Don’t miss…

Project 2436 sy: Defining a common PMIP-carbon protocol (PMIP)

The PMIP-carbon community is drafting a shared science plan and experimental design in order to perform coupled climate-carbon simulations within the next phase of PMIP.

Abstract

Simulating the carbon cycle during past climates provides a unique opportunity to investigate the importance of different mechanisms contributing to glacial-interglacial atmospheric pCO2 variations and to evaluate the model representation of biogeochemical processes. Confronting these simulation results within intercomparison
projects (such as PMIP) can then improve our understanding of model behaviours and biases.

However, the first opportunistic phase of PMIP-carbon (2019-2021) highlighted the need for a common protocol: we achieved the participation of nine climate models, but the various modelling choices related specifically to the carbon cycle undermined the interpretation of the model ensemble as a whole (Lhardy et al., 2021; Bouttes et al.,
2021). Still, preliminary results within the PalMod project (Liu et al., in prep) demonstrate again that a structured effort of different modelling groups has great potential to achieve comparable model outputs and address outstanding scientific questions which are still not elucidated despite decades of research.

Thanks to the support of a single-year project from INQUA, the opportunity of a wider-scale and more robust intercomparison phase for coupled carbon-climate simulations under past conditions is arising again at the start of a new CMIP7/PMIP5 phase. Our project has thus organized a workshop to gather much-needed community input, in view of publishing a PMIP-carbon protocol paper.

Objectives:

  • define key questions and experiments to be prioritized during CMIP7/PMIP5;
  • assess feasibility of simulations; discuss challenges, barriers and facilitators, in view of reaching the best compromise between a shared protocol and maximum inclusiveness for models of various complexity;
  • establish a long-term strategy to extend the initial project.

Project leaders:

  • Fanny Lhardy, France
  • Nathaelle Bouttes, France
  • Bo Liu, Germany

More

Publications

INQUA serves the Quaternary Research community by supporting the publication of two scientific journals published by Elsevier: Quaternary International (QI), a hybrid Journal launched in 1989 that publishes 36 volumes/year, Quaternary Environments and Humans (QEH),…