Empirical Validation of Conceptual Climate Models for the Mid-Pleistocene Transition

Abstract:

Conceptual climate models are useful for testing hypotheses regarding the processes underlying observations; but they generally can only qualitatively match the empirical records. Models based on substantially different underlying physics can have comparable correlations with any given observation, thus robust model validation procedures are needed. The Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT) is an ideal test case for the development of such procedures because the character and cause of the transition from a dominant 41 kyr cycle in the early Pleistocene to a dominant 100 kyr cycle in the late Pleistocene is poorly understood. Using Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition, we analyze multiple conceptual models for the MPT which are based on differing physical hypotheses and show how modern time-series-analysis techniques can improve climate-model validation by extracting and comparing subtler features of both the observations and models.