A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850-2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high- and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.
PAGES, a core project of Future Earth, is supported by the U.S. and Swiss National Science Foundations. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. Some of this work was conducted as part of the North America 2k Working Group supported by the John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey. B. Bauer, W. Gross, and E. Gille (NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information) are gratefully acknowledged for helping assemble the data citations and creating the NCEI versions of the PAGES 2k data records. We thank all the investigators whose commitment to data sharing enables the open science ethos embodied by this project.