Probabilistically Constraining Age-Depth-Models of Glaciogenic Sediments

Abstract:

Reconstructions of the late-Holocene climate rely heavily upon proxies that are assumed to be accurately dated by layer counting. All of these proxies, such as measurements of tree rings, ice cores, and varved lake sediments do carry some inherent dating uncertainty that is not always fully accounted for. Considerable advances could be achieved if time uncertainties were recognized and correctly modeled, also for proxies commonly treated as free of age model errors.

Current approaches for accounting for time uncertainty are generally limited to repeating the reconstruction using each one of an ensemble of age models, thereby inflating the final estimated uncertainty – in effect, each possible age model is given equal weighting. Uncertainties can be reduced by exploiting the inferred space–time covariance structure of the climate to re-weight the possible age models. Werner and Tingley (2015) demonstrated how Bayesian hierarchical climate reconstruction models can be augmented to account for time-uncertain proxies. In their method, probabilities associated with the age models are formally updated within the Bayesian framework, thereby reducing uncertainties. Numerical experiments (Werner and Tingley 2015) show that updating the age model probabilities decreases uncertainty in the resulting reconstructions, as compared with the current de facto standard of sampling over all age models, provided there is sufficient information from other data sources in the spatial region of the time-uncertain proxy.

We show how this novel method can be applied to high resolution, sub-annually sampled lacustrine sediment records to constrain their respective age depth models. The results help to quantify the signal content and extract the regionally representative signal. The single time series can then be used as the basis for a reconstruction of glacial activity.

van der Bilt et al. in prep.

Werner, J.P. and Tingley, M.P. Clim. Past (2015)