A multiproxy database of western North American Holocene paleoclimate records

Holocene climate reconstructions are useful for understanding the diverse features and spatial heterogeneity of past and future climate change. Here we present a database of western North American Holocene paleoclimate records. The database gathers paleoclimate time series from 209 terrestrial and marine sites, including 382 individual proxy records. The records span at least 4,000 of the last 12,000 years (median duration = 10,603 years), and have been screened for resolution, chronologic control, and climate sensitivity. Of the records in this compilation, 42% were previously included in version 1 of the Temperature 12k database (Kaufman et al., 2020). This database adds another 39 temperature-sensitive records, plus 179 records that reflect hydroclimate and circulation changes. The database is shared in the machine readable Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format and includes geochronologic data for generating site-level time-uncertain ensembles. This publicly accessible and curated collection of proxy paleoclimate records will have wide research applications, including, for example, investigations of the primary features of ocean-atmospheric circulation along the eastern margin of the North Pacific and the latitudinal response of climate to orbital changes.

This database is described by a manuscript in review in Earth System Science Data: manuscript ID essd-2020-2015. Upon publication, the database will be hosted by the World Data Service for Paleoclimatology (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/30535), and further updates will be available there.