FromHenry PollackDateMon, 10 Jul 2006 16:36:08 -0400
ToJonathan T. Overpeck
CCEystein Jansen, Keith Briffa, Ricardo Villalba, Jason Smerdon
SubjectRe: Borehole in the Southern Hemisphere

Hi Peck et al,

Thanks for your note about the Africa borehole reconstructions, along
with the correspondence with Jason Smerdon. In my e-mail to you on
April 18,2006 I had indicated that the African work was unpublished.
However, I had forgotten that the Nature paper by Huang, Pollack and
Shen (Temperature trends over the past five centuries reconstructed
from borehole temperatures, Nature 403, pp 756-758, 2000) actually
showed the reconstructions for both southern Africa and Australia as
bar graphs of century-long changes in Figure 3 of that paper. The
figure displaying both the Africa and Australia borehole
reconstructions that appears in the FAR draft (Figure 6.12? or was it
6.11?) shows temperature vs. time for five centuries, a display that
differs from the bar-graphs in the Nature paper only in format, not
data.

Inasmuch as there have been no additions to the datasets since that
paper, it seems that we can correctly say that the reconstructions for
southern Africa and Australia have both been published in the Nature
(2000) paper. There is nothing "wrong" or outdated with either of those
reconstructions. We have, in addition, a newer and more expansive paper
about Australia alone (discussing the same reconstruction as appeared
in the Nature paper), now in press in the Journal of Quaternary
Science. This paper was already mentioned in the e-mail of April 18,
2006, which I will paste at the end of this message.

Other questions?

Cheers,
Henry

___ ___ Henry N. Pollack
[ \ / ] Professor of Geophysics
| \/ | Department of Geological Sciences
|MICHIGAN| University of Michigan
[___]\/[___] Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1005, U.S.A.

Phone: 734-763-0084 FAX: 734-763-4690
e-mail: hpollack@umich.edu
URL: www.geo.lsa.umich.edu/~hpollack/
URL: www-personal.umich.edu/~hpollack/book.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail of April 18, 2006:

Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 16:26:27 -0400 [04/18/2006 04:26:27 PM EDT]
From: Henry Pollack Add to Address book
(hpollack@umich.edu) United States
To: Keith Briffa
Cc: jto@u.arizona.edu, eystein.jansen@geo.uib.no
Subject: IPCC FAR draft
Headers: Show All Headers
Hi Keith (and Peck and Eystein),

I have recently been sent the current draft of the IPCC FAR by the US
Global Change
Research Program, asking for comments on the draft. This is the first
time I have seen
this product since we were feverishly exchanging e-mails in February.
Let me call to your
attention some small but not insignificant corrections to be made to
the next draft.

Page 6-33, Section 6.6.1.2, line 22. The title of this section (in
italics) should be
changed to "What do ground surface temperature reconstructions derived
from subsurface
temperature measurements tell us?"

Page 6-33, lines 49 and 52, there is a reference (Smerdon et al., in press).
This paper has now been published, so substitute "2006" for "in press",
and in the list
of references the citation should include the following:

J. Geophys. Res. 111, D07101, doi:10.1029/2004JD005578

Page 6-34, lines 43 and 44. This section is dealing with the southern
hemisphere. The
sentence "...these both indicate unusually warm conditions prevailing
in the 20th century
(Pollack and Smerdon, 2004)" , and the reference therein, are both incorrect.

The ground surface temperature changes over the last 500 years DO NOT
indicate unusually
warm conditions prevailing in the 20th century in Australia and
southern Africa. This is
because the unusually warm conditions developed late in the century,
after most of the
boreholes had already been logged. What the borehole reconstruction
for Australia does
show is very good correspondence with the Cook et al (2000)
reconstruction for Tasmania
and the Cook et al. (2002) recon for New Zealand. The Australia work is
described in a
manuscript “Five centuries of Climate Change in Australia: The View
from Underground” by
Pollack, Huang and Smerdon now under review in the Journal of
Quaternary Science. The
Africa work is unpublished.

Is this e-mail to you sufficient to activate these changes? Or should I
submit these
comments to the US Government Review Panel? If I am to submit to the
latter, they require
all comments to be filed by May 9.

Cheers,
Henry

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quoting Jonathan Overpeck :

> Hi Henry - hope you're having a nice summer. I just got back from the
> IPCC mtg where we made plans for generating the final draft of our
> paleo chapter. One question that came up is whether we can show (in
> Fig 6.12 - southern hemisphere climate records of the last
> millennium) your borehole recon for southern Africa. As you can see
> below, Jason Smerdon has told our SH lead, Ricardo Villalba that the
> recon we've used is not yet published. The question for you is
> whether we can/should use a version that IS published, We feel your
> recon is an important one to show as it represents a region not
> represented by other good reconstructions. But, we don't want to use
> something that has proven to be wrong.
>
> We appreciate your input on this issue. Also, if there is a published
> recon that we can use, would you pls send the recon (guess it's only
> one value per century, right?) and the ref we should cite?
>
> As you can imagine, we're under a tough time constraint, so if you
> can let us know as soon as you can, that would be great.
>
> Many thanks, Peck
>
>
>> X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.2
>> From: "Ricardo Villalba"
>> To: "Keith R. Briffa" ,
>> "Jonathan Overpeck"
>> Subject: Borehole in the Southern Hemisphere
>> Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 06:00:20 -0300
>>
>> Hi Keith and Peck,
>> Please, find below a copy of the message that I got from Jason Smerdon,
>> regarding the South African borehole record. It looks that the record as it
>> is shown in Figure 6.12 has not been published, however former versions of
>> the South African reconstruction have been included in at least two papers.
>> Please, let me know your impressions to proceed with this matter. Cheers,
>> Ricardo
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jason Smerdon"
>> To: "Ricardo Villalba"
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 8:09 PM
>> Subject: Re: Publication in JQR
>>
>>
>>> Hi Ricardo,
>>>
>>> I believe that you are referring to the reconstruction from the Southern
>>> Africa holes that we provided to Tim Osborn. That reconstruction has not
>>> been published as a time series as it is shown in Tim's figure. I
>>> believe, however, that the same reconstruction was published as a
>>> histogram in the following reference:
>>>
>>> Huang S, Pollack HN, Shen PY. 2000. Temperature trends over the last five
>>> centuries reconstructed from borehole temperatures. Nature 403: 756-758.
>>>
>>> The only thing that might be different is the number of holes that were
>>> used, but I don't think that part of the dataset has been updated since
>>> Huang's 2000 paper. To confirm this I would encourage you to contact
>> > Henry Pollack at hpollack@umich.edu. He will know for sure. A similar
>>> reconstruction using a subset of the Southern Africa holes is referenced
>>> in the Australian paper:
>>>
>>> Tyson PD, Mason SJ, Jones MQW, Cooper GRJ. 1998. Global warming and
>>> geothermal profiles: The surface rock temperature response in South
>>> Africa. Geophysical Research Letters 25: 2711-2714.
>>>
>>> But the reconstruction will of course not be exactly equal to the larger
>>> Southern African reconstruction that we provided for Tim. I hope this
>>> helps and let me know if I can be of any further assistance.
>>>
>>> Jason
>>>
>>> On Wed, 28 Jun 2006, Ricardo Villalba wrote:
>>>
>>> > Dear Jason,
>>> > Thanks for the preprint. Do you know if the South African borehole
>> records
>>> > has been published? Thanks,
>>> > RIcardo
>>> >
>>>
>>>
>
>
> --
> Jonathan T. Overpeck
> Director, Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
> Professor, Department of Geosciences
> Professor, Department of Atmospheric Sciences
>
> Mail and Fedex Address:
>
> Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
> 715 N. Park Ave. 2nd Floor
> University of Arizona
> Tucson, AZ 85721
> direct tel: +1 520 622-9065
> fax: +1 520 792-8795
> http://www.geo.arizona.edu/
> http://www.ispe.arizona.edu/
>
>
>