New Collaborative and Interdisciplinary Publication – Gooding, et al.

The IOWC is proud to announce a new interdisciplinary publication. Building on the themes and collaborations of our Appraising Risk Partnership, Project Manager Philip Gooding worked with Melissa Lazenby and Mick Frogley of the University of Sussex and IOWC RAs Cecile Dai and Wenqi Su to develop a new method for reconstructing historical climates. This method, which integrates evidence from historical documents and existing climate models and reanalysis, represents a trans-disciplinary breakthrough in climate reconstruction. It provides a rubric for how historians and climate modellers can use and integrate each other’s sources. This is especially important for regions in which there has been limited in-region climatological research conducted up to now, which includes vast swathes of the Indian Ocean World and other regions in the Global South. Here, the authors demonstrate the availability and relevance of historical sources and how evidence from them can be integrated with modelled climate data. Their approach has the capacity to refine how models predict future climatic changes under different global warming scenarios.

Access the article here:

Philip Gooding, Melissa J. Lazenby, Michael R. Frogley, Cecile Dai, and Wenqi Su, ‘Documents, reanalysis, and global circulation models: a new method for reconstructing historical climate focusing on present-day inland Tanzania, 1856–1890,’ Climate of the Past, 20, 12 (2024): 2701-2718. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-20-2701-2024